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WILLIAM WILLIAM BLAKE BLAKE'S WRITINGS
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Engr.««d and Ft Edited b> Dw*JV Erdm At I he Clarendon Press ^^y AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY 65 «b3u^^ VOLUME 17 NUMBER I SUMMER 1983 BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 CONTRIBUTORS ROBERT ALTER is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. His two most recent books are The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic Books, 1981) and Motives for Fiction, which will be published in 1984 by Harvard University Press. SHELLEY M. BENNETT, Ph.D. in An History from UCLA AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY 65 (1977), has published on aspects of English art, in particular VOLUME 17 NUMBER 1 SUMMER 1983 eighteenth-century book illustration. She is currently As• sistant Curator of the Henry E. Huntington Art Gallery. CONTENTS ELIZABETH B. BENTLEY wrote her review at the Bod• leian Library. The proofreading was done in Shanghai, where she is teaching at Fudan and Tongji Universities. Normally, 4 Redefining the Texts of Blake (another temporary report) she teaches and resides in Toronto. by David V. Erdman G. E. BENTLEY, JR., sometime of the universities of Chi• MINUTE PARTICULARS cago, Toronto, Algiers and Poona, is currently Fulbright Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Lit• 16 Charles Parr Burney as a Blake Collector by G. E. Bent- erature of Fudan University, Shanghai, Peoples Republic of ley, Jr. China, where he lives in luxury (maid-service, personal in• 16 An Emendation in "The Chimney Sweeper" of Innocence terpreter, transportation) and teaches Blake. by Alexander S. Gourlay V. A. DE LUCA is Professor of English at the University of 18 A Minute Particular in Blake's Songs of Innocence, Copy Toronto. His article, "The Changing Order of Plates in Je• O by Theresa M. Kelley rusalem, Chapter II," appeared in the Spring 1983 issue of Blake. REVIEWS DAVID ERDMAN is very hopeful he's found a publisher 20 Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, for the Four Zoas facsimile with commentary on the designs, reviewed by Robert Alter by Professor Magno and himself. 22 William L. Pressly, The Life and Art of James Barry, ALEXANDER S. GOURLAY is an instructor at the College reviewed by Shelley M. Bennett of Wooster (Ohio). He is writing a dissertation on The Book 24 Essick and Labelle, eds., Flaxman's Illustrations to Homer, ofThel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion and is co-author reviewed by Janet Warner (with John E. Grant) of an essay on Blake and Reynolds forthcoming in the Bulletin of Research in the Humanities. 25 Blake, a play written and directed by Grant Hehir, reviewed by Michael J. Tolley NELSON HILTON'S Literal Imagination: Blake's Vision of 26 James King and Charles Ryskamp, eds., The Letters and Words has just been published by the University of California Prose Writings of William Cowper Vol. II: Letters 1782- Press. 1876, reviewed by Donald H. Reiman THERESA M. KELLEY, Associate Professor of English at 30 Davis Grubb, Ancient Lights, reviewed by Nelson Hilton the University of Texas at San Antonio, is the author of articles 32 Warren Stevenson, The Myth of the Golden Age in English on Wordsworth, romantic figuration, eighteenth-century Romantic Poetry, reviewed by V. A. De Luca iconography and the sister arts. She is completing a book on Wordsworth's aesthetics as an archeology of the mind. 32 Geoffrey Keynes, Kt., and Peter Davidson, eds., A Watch of Nightingales, reviewed by G. E. Bentley, Jr. DONALD H. REIMAN'S volumes VII and VIII of Shelley 36 Nancy Willard, A Visit to William Blake's Inn, Poems for and His Circle wend their way through several stages of proof Innocent and Experienced Travelers, reviewed by Elizabeth toward publication in 1984, while he also shepherds to press the first dozen volumes of Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics, B. Bentley of which he is General Editor. In this series Garland Pub- © 1983 by Morris Eaves and Morton D. Paley SUMMER 1983 BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY lishing will issue in facsimile, with full scholarly apparatus, important literary manuscripts of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and INFORMATION their circles. MICHAEL J. TOLLEY is currently Chairman of the De• Editorial Assistants in charge: Marcy Erickson, Susan partment of English at the University of Adelaide, thus add• Corban, Univ. of New Mexico. Editorial Assistants: ing further delays to his continuing work on William Blake's Peter Chase, Leslie Donovan, Barbara Guth, Letty Designs to Edward Young's Night Thoughts and Blake's use of Rutledge Univ. of New Mexico. the Bible: an annotated checklist. He is, however, reviewing Tannenbaum for SiR and preparing an article on Blake's (as Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly is published under the he maintains) "To the Nightingale." sponsorship of the Department of English, University of JANET WARNER is Associate Professor of English at Glen- New Mexico. don College, York University, Toronto. Subscriptions are $15.00 for 1 year, 1 volume (4 issues). Special rates for individuals, $12.00 for 1 year surface mail subscriptions. Air mail subscriptions are $10.00 EDITORS more than surface mail subscriptions. U.S. currency or international money order if possible. Make checks Editors: Morris Eaves, Univ. of New Mexico, and Morton payable to Blake I An Illustrated Quarterly. Address all D. Paley, Univ. of Calif, Berkeley. subscription orders and related communications to Mar• cy Erickson, Blake, Dept. of English, Univ. of New Bibliographer: Thomas L. Minnick, Ohio State Univ. Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA. Review Editor: Nelson Hilton, Univ. of Georgia, Athens. Some back issues are available. Address Marcy Erickson for a list of issues and prices. Associate Editor for Great Britain: Frances A. Carey, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Drawings, Manuscripts are welcome. Send two copies, typed and British Museum. documented according to the forms suggested in the MLA Style Sheet, 2nd. ed., to either of the editors: Production Office: Morris Eaves, Department of English, Morris Eaves, Dept. of English, Univ. of New Mexico, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque NM 87131, Albuquerque, NM 87131; Morton D. Paley, Dept. of Telephone 505/277-3103. English, Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. Morton D. Paley, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. International Serial Number is 0006-4 5 3x. Blake I An Il• Thomas L. Minnick, University College, Ohio State lustrated Quarterly is indexed in the Modern Language University, 1050 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210. Association's International Bibliography, the Modern Nelson Hilton, Department of English, University of Humanities Research Association's Annual Bibliography Georgia, Athens, GA 30602. of English Language and Literature, English Language Frances A. Carey, Department of Prints and Drawings Notes' annual Romantic Bibliography, ARTbibliog- British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WClB raphies MODERN, American Humanities Index, and 3DG, England. the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 Redefining the Texts of Blake (another temporary report) DAVID V ERDMAN Thirteen years ago I submitted "A Temporary Report on nition of the committees of textual scholars who watched Texts of Blake" to the Damon Festschrift.1 Wondering and assisted the labor —judicially the CSE (MLA) who ap• how perfectly or imperfectly the "texts" which Blake had proved the procedures and format; critically the four etched, left in manuscript, or submitted to printers were scholars who helped check the text against originals or via represented in the available and forthcoming editions of film and facsimile: Robert Essick, John E. Grant, Mary Blake and in the Concordance of 1968 prepared by a Lynn Johnson Grant, and E. B. Murray. The present team often Blake scholars, I made a survey of the "partic• report is not quite exhaustive (dealing rarely with punc• ular passages" that remained "incompletely transcribed or tuation) and is intended primarily to enable users of any not certainly established." Since that time the informal of the texts collated to find quickly what differences ap• collaboration of editors and other scholars in a "web of pear in C. Explanations of changes in C will be found in mutual communication of reports and queries and photo• its textual notes, but certain critical passages are discussed stats" has continued, and the number of uncertain pas• briefly in this report. (Changes made in the second and sages has diminished. Many cruxes remain, however, and third printings of E are not cited.) Points where B ques• some of the "certainties" of 1969 have been questioned. tions readings in E are attended to in the textual notes of And the hope for technological advances that would C but if puzzling also noted here. reduce the "illegibles" of palimpsest (chiefly in The Four The fact that text and notes have been completely Zoas) has risen high, only to sink again. reset for C (and many of the notes rewritten) will mean The texts collated for this new report are four: that some errors have crept in. Responses to this report E Erdman, ed. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake will be welcome, for revisions in subsequent printings. (Doubleday 1965, fourth printing 1970) with com• The format of the textual notes in E and C is used in mentary by Bloom. the notes that follow, and the symbols used in K and B K Keynes, ed. Blake: Complete Writings (Oxford Univ. are transposed into the same format. Square brackets [] Press 1966; 4th revised printing 1976; fifth 19792). enclose words or letters editorially inserted; italicized in• B Bentley, ed. William Blake's Writings (Oxford Univ. sertions represent [deleted matter] restored. Angle Press 1978; two vols, paginated continuously). brackets < > enclose words or letters inserted by Blake; C The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, ed. "rdg" and "del" stand for "reading" and "deleted." Erdman, with commentary by Bloom (Doubleday, All editorial emendations are indicated, with one ex• paper; University of California Press, cloth 1982). ception. For the possessive of "Los" Blake often wrote Also occasionally cited are: "Los's" but also frequently omitted the apostrophe; in the BB Bentley, Blake Books (Oxford Univ. Press 1977). latter instances, to avoid the clutter of brackets, the N Erdman and Moore, eds. The Notebook of apostrophe has been inserted silently. William Blake (photographic and typographic fac• The textual note on punctuation has been revised simile; Oxford Univ. Press 1973; revised ed. somewhat. But I find that a further word is advisable Readex Books 1977). N, not in italics, refers simply about Blake's indications for paragraphing and about his to the Notebook itself. occasional intermingling of design and text, insofar as it SAP Erdman "The Suppressed and Altered Passages in concerns the transcriber. Pictures interrupting the text, in Blake's Jerusalem," Studies in Bibliography 17 Milton and Jerusalem for instance, sometimes serve as (1964): 1-54. paragraph breaks but sometimes not. The designs after "C" has been chosen as symbol for the new edition line 12 and line 27 in J 9 and after lines 13 and 26 in J 20 (rather than, say, E2) as more impersonal and in recog• do not halt the narrative; those in7 20 after lines 4, 11, SUMMER 1983 BLAKE AS ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY PAGE 5 20, 21, and 41 definitely do. And in his prose, Blake respond with the grouping by color made in copy H (with sometimes indicates a paragraph by a long dash, as after obvious care, since the groups so indicated make sense). "Sword" in the Milton Preface. Other improvements made by Blake in copy H include Verse paragraphs are usually only spaced, but some• the correction of two scribal errors by using (as ancient times they are indicated by indentation; we treat them scribes did) a macron or horizontal stroke above a letter to alike typographically. Sometimes a punctuation mark indicate accidental omission of a letter or letters (or small seems turning into vegetation or feather; sometimes a word) immediately following. In 10:9 Blake corrects "im- detail of foliage is thrust into position to serve as punc• provent" with a macron over the "v" to make "improve• tuation. Consider: is not the bird at the end of7 61:23 ment"^ in the next line). In 14:5 he etched "at tree" serving as a dash —yet still in flight as a bird? (EKB) but a macron in copy H indicates correction to "at The punctuation for this edition (C) has been the tree" (C). (Uncorrected words, "wholsom" and thoroughly checked by our proofreading team against "witheld," lack only inessential letters.) originals and photographs and facsimiles, also against B. See textual note on 3:6 re "the Devil who dwells." Agreement within the team has not always been unan• In "A Song of Liberty" corrections of punctuation imous; B, however, has been found more often disagreed made in copy H are adopted in C: 3 ocean?] corrected with than agreed with in this matter. Textual notes deal to ocean! 6 weep] to weep! (C). with some of these punctuational cruxes, but no attempt Visions of the Daughters of Albion is made to cover them in the present report. All editions agree, except for two variants in B that Works in Illuminated Printing must be scribal errors: omission of "are" before "their The works are listed, in this and subsequent sections, in habitations" in 3:5 (B's 6:5) and "and" for "&" in 3:12. the order of arrangement of texts in E and C. I.e., no variants in Blake. All Religions are One America a Prophecy Now placed first, from evidence given by Geoffrey Canceled plate c:12 mossy pile (KEB) / massy pile (C) Keynes in his Blake Trust facsimile (but not applied in K c:22[&]orshut . . . [&] in (KB) / or shut . . . &in(E)/ 1979). Spelling variants are all that occur: & shut & in (C) Principle 4th travelling (KE) / traveling (BC) Milton Principle 5th Religeons (E) / Religions (KBC) each Nation's (EK) / each Nations (BC) 2:21 deed (K482) / deed? (E95) / deed[.] (B320) / deed[?] (C96), there being no punctuation at this point There is No Natural Religion in any copy. The paragraph headed "Conclusion" is now moved 10:3 into the Space] B omits "the" in error. from version (a) to version (b) following the paragraph 11:35 spake (EK) / spoke (BC) headed "Application." 23:28 spoke (EK) / spake (BC) 24[26]: 63-64. lulld by the flutes lula lula / The Songs of Innocence & of Experience bellowing Furnaces blare by the . . . clarion (B, giving text without emendation) / . . . flutes' lula lula . . . Night 44 Grase (E) / Graze (KBC—see textual note) Furnaces blare . . . (K) / . . . flutes lula lula . . . The Tyger [6 eyes!] (E) / eyes? (KBC) 16 clasp? (EK) Furnacesf] blare (EC). Too late to change, it was noted / clasp! (BC) that C should also give "flutes[']"; readers often mistake The Human Abstract Line 8 in N 107 draft ("The this passage, not sensing that "blare" is a noun here, not a human image"): And spreads his [nets] baits with care verb. The instruments are played "to ameliorate . . . (EK) / corrected by Bentley to ". . . his [seeds] baits ..." (BC) slavery" (61). The sounds of Hammers "are lulld by the A Divine Image Now described, since discovery of flutesj'] lula lula" and the blare of the Furnaces is lulled copy BB, as not simply "rejected" but early and replaced. by the long sounding clarion; the drum drowns the To Tirzah C note on date (ca. 1803) is important, howls, &c. since B682 gives "perhaps 1797" (despite own evidence). 31:13 Towards America . . . golden bed (EKC) / Line omitted (B) For Children: The Gates of Paradise Jerusalem PI. 13: variant in N 61: What we hope we see (EKC) / ... to see (B) To the Public 3:8 the Ancients entrusted their love to their The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Writing (EK) / the ancients acknowledge their love to The "Proverbs" are now grouped by spacing, to cor• their Deities (C) / (B questions all restorations of this plate) BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 In 1969 I could say that "no passages still in doubt" 18:36 So cry Hand & Hyle (EKBC) mended to "So were "as central and significant as the Plate 3 deletions in criest thou? & Hyle" in copy B —first noted in C. The Jerusalem" and could describe these as "now restored." In "u" is formed in the space between "n" and "d"; the "?" February 1980 a letter from Michael Tolley queried my is made of a bit of interlinear ornament. This and the restoration of the words "entrusted" and "Writing" in change in 17:21 are retouchings in the red-brown ink of this gouged-out passage, and a very careful rechecking, the printing; other words are retouched without change by myself and others, using enlarged photographs from in lines 10, 11, 20, 22, 25. Whoever made the mendings the Rosenwald and Morgan copies and the posthumous in 18 and 17 was inattentive to the sense and syntax. Rosenbloom copy and the unenlarged photograph of the BB 732 notes that some "words and designs are clar• Morgan page in SAP (which shows nearly everything that ified in pencil (pi. 5, 7-10 [but these are in design only], in the others do). Red ink (pi. 8 [design only]), or in Black ink (pi. 9-11, My error resulted from incomplete observance of my 15, 19-22, 25 [words retouched in 10, 11, 20, 22, 25, own procedures, spelled out in SAP. The word read as without change])." B and BB overlook the actual changes "entrusted" or "acknowledge" has three ascending strokes in pi. 17 & 18, noted above. (we must ignore the descending stroke of "p" from the 21:44 worshipped (EKB) / warshipped (C and line above); I had failed to notice that on this page 1982K) Footnote on the page points out that the reading Blake's t's barely rise above the body of the letters, hence makes sense yet may be a misprint for "worshipped". that none of the three ascenders could be a "t". Indeed, (The "a" is made with the usual serif at top right, the first ascender has a bend (not apparent in the Morgan, never given to an "o", which is made in a circular sweep. or it would have been noted sooner) which can belong The "a" is made with a curved stroke that begins at the only to a "k" in this script. The word "Acknowledge" in top, comes up to make the serif and down again to connect the very next line is more visible and offers a perfect with the next letter. Of course an "a" can look something model to test the misread word. Of the other queried like an "o", but even the "a" in "massy" in America c, word, the only plainly visible letters are "iti" in the misread until now, though it lacks the protruding serif center. The first letter, a bombed-out capital, has edges does have the vertical right side produced by the up and in the Rosenwald copy that fit a Blakean "W"; but, as I down motion described. now see, in the Morgan the crater is encircled not merely 24:60 Hope is banished from me] (KBC; yet B in by dots but by a large loop fitting exactly the "D" of "Addenda and Corrigenda", p. xxvi, gives "from us" as a "Divine" seven lines further down. And the second letter correction, without explanation.) is more like "e" than "r". "Writing" was not an impos• 27 Begin new paragraph with "But now the Starry sible hypothesis; "Deities" works perfectly. (I should add Heavens ..." (BC). that Mary Lynn Johnson and John Grant, in the Norton 27: next paragraph: was Created (EKBC) / B738 lists Critical Blake (1979), recognizing something wrong with "was" as an error for "were"; indeed the grammar is poly- the passage, refer to "Blake's somewhat garbled defense semous and debatable. Problem overlooked in C. of enthusiasm in this mutilated passage" (p. 312n4). The 32[36]:34 South [ ]ing (E) / South bounding (C). garbling was mine. Explained in Blake 13:106. (I am told that in semiotic circles, the phrase "en• 40[45]:31 hands (KEC) / hand (B, printer's error?) trusted their love to their Writing" was becoming a 42:47 abhorred friend (KBC) / abhorred [fiend] (E); favorite locus classicusl Mea culpa!) B and C note that "friend" may be an error for "fiend" 7:65 Generation Image of regeneration!] "Image" but that the context gives support to the original reading. was scratched through for deletion and is illegible or 30[34]:10 Why have thou elevate (KEC) / [Why nearly so in most copies but was retouched into legibility hast thou elevated] (B). (Yet nine lines earlier "I am Love in copies B and D. (Some copy B retouchings are clearly / Elevate into the Region" is given without comment or irresponsible: see notes on plate 17 and 18, below.) "Im• emendation in B.) age" is shown undeleted in KB (with a note in B); "[Im• 56:37 earth-Worm (KBC) / earth-Worms (E) age]" in EC, signifying deletion editorially restored, with Changed by ink in copy F, not necessarily by Blake. B asserts a textual note of explanation, but perhaps it should have "by Blake" yet retains "earth-Worm"; K does not note; been printed with this note but without the bracketing. change adopted in E, with note; rejected in C, with note. (The details of the note in B [429] err from the correct ac• 66:38 Their ear bent (KEBC) B with note: "Blake count in SAP 16.) probably intended 'ears' plural"; perhaps, though sin• 8:32 The uncircumcised (E, in error but corrected in gulars come in line 40. 4th printing) / Thy Uncircumcised (KBC) 77: bottom corners. Deleted lines, partly legible in 17:21 fit for labour (EKBC) / changed to copy F and posthumous copies I and J; for the first time "labours" by printers' ink in copy B, but unidiomatic. fully recovered for C; reading column for column instead Noted now in C. of line for line, as we all had been doing: SUMMER 1983 BLAKE AS ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY PAGE 7 The Real Se\f[bood] in the takes this conjectured 2nd rdg for a proposed final rdg. is the Imagination Divine Man 1:28 serpents [?all] (B) / (del word is not noted in K(919n) had read the top row, though not noting that KEC, but B is correct). "hood" was scratched out on the copper (Blake, having 3:32 seeks] runs 1st rdg del (EBC) (K: ''word del") begun to write about the real Selfhood as against the 4:50 rent] mended from rend (noted in EBC, not K) spectral Selfhood, then passed beyond irony to em• 4:63 • • • and know your father 1st rdg del {EC) (K phasize "The Real Self). elides; B notes E rdg but considers its "and know" a single In SAP I concurred with the K reading of the top illegible word.) row, venturing only a few letters for the bottom row: 5:5 [earth] ground (K) / [ground] world (E) / [world] ground (B) / [ground] earth (C) (No comment.) The Real Self [hood] in the is the?Spectre?within P . . . . T . . m The French Revolution B has now deciphered that last phrase, putting "Divine Man" Having been mistaken in the faulty recollection (I convincingly in place of "P . . . T . . . m" but unac• had once checked the original proofs) that traditional quo• countably losing "in the," perhaps still trying to read line for tation marks were in the printed text, I have now removed line. C puts cautionary question marks on "Imagination" them all; Blake himself would have supplied none. and "Man," but "tion" is clearly a better fit for the end of the More fully explanatory notes are now supplied for first column than "thin." The Concordance shows Blake the readings bonds/bands (line 74), cloud/loud (101), speaking several times of "The Imagination" as the "Real war-living/war living (283). Man," an idea attributed to Jesus in Anno. Berkeley. 87:6-7 the space between these lines in E has been The Four Zoas properly removed in C (as in KB). This report does not attempt to deal with all the dif• 89:26 Rocks (KE) / flocks (BC) ferences among editions in the handling of deleted mat• 96:34 rouze up, rouze up! (K) / rouze up. rouze up. ter and in arrangement of pages. For the recovery of (E) / rouze up! rouze up. (C, as in originals) / (B omits passages hitherto considered deleted see comment on one "rouze up" altogether and puts an editorial "!" on pages 5,6, and 7. For drastic rearrangement of the consti• the one retained; probably a simple error of tuent pages of Night the Seventh, briefly described below, transcription). B's note that lines 1-25 "are curtailed" one must get one's sense of the effect by consulting the omits the explanation found in SAP. rearranged text itself. 97:45 mending of "thy Covenant" is correctedly In the new edition (C) for convenience of using the described in B637n but wrongly described in B634n. Concordance (based on K) we have given the K line 98:48 Sacrifices (KEC) / Sacrifice (B637, with note numbers, within brackets, since they are continuous for treating the "s" as doubtful). But the "s" is only crowded, each Night. But here I cite simply page and line numbers not hidden, by the border; the syntax requires a plural. for the page. 3:8 no Individual [Knoweth nor] (B accidently omits On Virgil "Individual"). Concluding sequence is rearranged thus: 4:13 It is not Love I bear to [Jerusalem] It is Pity] See Mathematic Form is Eternal in the Reasoning textual note for explanation of this editorial replacement Memory. Living Form is Eternal Existence. of "Enitharmon" by "Jerusalem." Grecian is Mathematic Form Pages 5-6] These pages have each ten new lines, pre• Gothic is Living Form viously considered deleted from failure to understand (This part of the text is in two columns; previous tran• that when Blake circled a deleted passage he meant to re• scripts have put the second column first.) store it to the text; page 7 has been restored from its mistaken conflation (in E) with page 143, the readings in Laocoon which are now recognized as preceding, not following, Practise is Art] now moved to precede A Poet a the final readings in p. 7. Andrew Lincoln cleared up Painter . . . (Printers' error in C: photograph facing these matters in Blake 46:91-95. p. 273 is printed as a negative, with black printed for 27:9 O Lamb] I ?die 1st rdg erased (EC) / [word white; corrected in the clothbound.) del] (B) 30:16 ?halls of 1st rdg erased (EB) / centr f[orm] (C) PROPHETIC WORKS, UNENGRAVED 39:18-40:1 But saw not ... in the cloud] Two lines shown as del (KEB); as undeleted (C): they are simply TIRIEL lined through lightly in pencil to be excluded when the 1:19 shrinking] 1st rdg del heaving (K) / living passage was copied into J 43. (EBC); 2nd rdg del ?shriecking (EC) Note in B903 mis• P. 41: Text unchanged (except for recognizing the PAGE 8 BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 "I" in line 10 as undeleted), but see elaborately revised tex• 98, after 31 Then I heard the Earthquake &c (KEB) / tual note concerning the late insertion of the name "Al• Then Heavd the Earthquake &c (C) bion" on this page. (But K and B, mistaking the page 101:31 expelled (KB) / repelled (EC) markings, move line 10 to follow line 4, in error.) 113:25 in its Islands (E) / on its Islands (KBC) 42:18 She ended. [From] his wrathful throne burst 105:24 there was hidden (E) / then was hidden (KBC) forth (E) / She ended, for [from] his wrathful . . . (C) 119:18 flames whirring up (E) / ... li[c]king KB change the ms period to a comma; E misread the up (KBC) "for" as a canceled "From" —now supplied in C as the 121:7 pleasant garden (EB) / pleasant gardens (KC) needed connective. The squiggle that looks like "for" 126:6-7 obey & live . . . return O love (EC) / . . . may have been meant for "from" — or both words were in• return & Love (KB, missing the progression of thought. tended but one slipped away. Since the "&" and "O" are written clearly, K and B It is also worth noting that here, and elsewhere, assume a scribal error; B even suggests that "& live" could Bentley's spacing of lines hides the evidence of paragraph be "O live"). spacing when inserted lines, belonging to one paragraph 145:10 (passage quoted in textual note on 106:6) Of or the other, physically fill an original gap. In this most mournful pity (EK) / Of most merciful(?) pity dialogue betwen Ahania and Urizen, the line "She ended (BC) —a more probable reading than "mournful" in the ..." should stand as a paragraph by itself, between context; the written word is wobbly, the first 3 letters her speech and his. more clearly "mere" than "mour," the fourth not ob• 47:22 despair comes over (KEB) / editorial insertion viously either "i" or "n." in C: over [me] POETICAL SKETCHES 56:23 is followed by Blake's instruction: "Bring in here the Globe of Blood as in the B of Urizen" (a To Summer: 15 Our youth[s] (E) / youths (K) / reference to Urizen 18); editors have heretofore shirked youth (BC) their duty, but the lines fit perfectly, treating two Urizen Samson: (10 lines from end): stocks (E) / flocks lines as one. (We enclose the resulting four lines within (KBC) editorial brackets.) (C338) Then She bore Pale desire Night The Seventh In this fragment a change of position is made of the The long debated conflation of the two Nights the clause "Shame bore honour & made league with Pride," Seventh (A and B) into one is carried out here with benefit from line 75 to lines 91-92. of the proposals discussed by Andrew Lincoln, Mark Lefebvre, and John Kilgore in Blake 12 (1978): 107-34, AN ISLAND IN THE MOON along the lines of my discussion following theirs (135-39). In E a fairly "clean" text was printed, without the See the textual headnote on C836. many slight mendings of letters or parts of words that 78:13 rangd his [Books] Books around (B1185) / strew the manuscript. C includes some of these, when any rangd his rocks a[round] Book around 1st rdg (EC) / significance can be deduced. The few reported here con• rang'd his {word del. ] Books around (K) tain some new readings, or confirmation of disputed 82:33 face lightnings] face [thy sons) < & his > light• readings in E. nings 1st rdg (EC) / face, [worddel.) lightnings (K) / face; E440/C449: question mark now removed from [tipsy] [thy PSmiles] lightnings (B1193). Yet not a very diffi• (Mrs Gimblet); plural retained in "his own imaginations" cult ms. (despite removal by B875). B, indeed, seems seldom to 85:41-42 Thou didst subdue me . . . lust & murder accept Blake's thin terminal "s"; in IM p. 4 he even (KE) (Now moved in BC to follow 85:38; these lines are reduces "the names in the Bible" to a singular. written in the bottom margin and not precisely marked (A propos, B has 21 footnotes citing readings in E, for insertion; I agree with Bl 198 that "The sense seems to not always questioning them but never incorporating sanction their insertion here." them; all these have now been multiple-checked and 91:11 red Ore in his [word erased) fury (K) / . . .in found sound. Most of them are quite legible to others, as his[triumphant]fury(E)/ . . . in his [hlind(?) f th(?)J well as to me.) fury (B) / . . .in his [> triumphant) fury (C, a bit less cer• Chap. 1, 3rd par.: [Quid] [ Chap. 6, opening: Then all went (E) / They all went seems to be written over something else (B978). Our (KBC) committee struggled with this, to no avail. Was it first Chap. 8 O ay Lock said Scopprell. [Its a book about] "flowery head" or "flourishing head"? No, Blake clearly (K, punctuated, C) / Deletion omitted (E) / [three words wrote "haid" and changed the "d" to "r," perhaps then del] (B) dotting the "i" (for here is one of the few "i" dots on the page). Was it "flaming" changed to "flourishing" or vice Chap. 11 [how many Blackamoors . . . ] (K) / [[If] versa? Or "flowing" to "flaming"? How many . . . ] (E768/C850) / [?If ?we ?manage Blackamoors] (B898, but quoting E in a note, as supply• "My Spectre . . . " (N 13, 12) And let us go to ing a "rather more plausib[le] reading"). the highest downs (EKC) / . . . high downs . . . (B927 —but the "st" is legible, though cramped; a one- [SONGS AND BALLADS] syllable word would mar the rhythm). "A fairy ..." [leapt] skipt (K) / [leapt] skipd To my Mirtle (N106) The 16 lines (N 113, 111, (EC) / leapt Stept (B1070: "'Stept' is written above 106) arranged under the title "in a mirtle shade" in E460 'leapt,' which has not been deleted"). Presumably B does (18 lines in K169) were recognized as not constituting an not mean the line to be read with both verbs in it but authentic separate poem when I was collaborating with means to urge that Blake had not decided which to keep. Donald K. Moore on the Notebook facsimile; a note to Presumably "skipt" or "skipd" is ruled out because Blake that effect was inserted in the 4th printing of E (pp. didn't dot the "i" (yet he did not cross the "t" either). 769.70 —and see the extensive note in N Appendix I pp. 69-71); in C these lines have been allowed to sink back To Mrs Ann Flaxman 2 Its form was lovely into their proper state as a canceled extension of "Infant (EKC) / lively (Bl331 — curious because there is nothing Sorrow" (given and discussed in the notes section to be taken for an i dot here; in fact the open o could be C797-99). Yeats and Ellis had started this rearranging "ac• mistaken for u: luvely). cording to the editor's taste" (to quote Geoffrey Keynes The Mental Traveller (Pickering MS scrutinized in his autobiography, The Gates of Memory, 1981, p. in the Morgan Library) There are a few passages writ• 255) and in 1926 Max Plowman had recognized that "in a ten over fairly complete erasures; B1306 attempts some mirtle shade" (lower case) was not a title but a catch- conjectural restorations, for lines 85, 86, 91, impossible phrase indicating where Blake wanted to fit the lines that to confirm. follow into his "Infant Sorrow" extension. Plowman un• The Grey Monk (N 8[12]) Deletion under line fortunately had made a mistaken reconstruction of the se• 11: From his dry tongue . . . (K419/E778/C860) / quence in the manuscript; so Keynes and the rest of us From his aking tongue (B930) had carved out a separate poem (KEB). Alas, A. E. When Klopstock (N 1[5]) 29: [Then after] Housman wrote to Keynes (loc. cit.) that he preferred the "And his legs carried it . . . " (N 22-23) Line base. The point may still be missed; hence the fuller ex• 25 And Cur my Lawyer & Dady [my] Jack Hemps Parson planation here. (As for dialect, B952 fails to recognize (EC)/. . . &Dadymus(P). . . (B936). EC infer deletion, "ham" as "them," not "him.") i.e. that Blake having written (for his persona, Stewhard) Now that we have learned that "poco pen" was really "Cur my Lawyer and Dady my Parson," then decided to written "poco piu" (a little bit more), we have a punning call him Flaxman's parson: "Jack Hemps Parson." Until glossary of the slippery language of the "Cunning-sures & we find an explanation either for Dady or for Dadymus, the aim-at-yours" (N 40), i.e. the connoisseurs and the crux is empty of content. amateurs. When they are buying or selling they "keep up "Was I angry . . . " (N 23) The line 6 deletion a Jaw" (N 43) about that soupcon or poco piu oije ne sais "Mirths" (EC, not in K) stands obviously for "Mirth is." quoi the presence or absence of which makes a work pre• "Mirth" (B) makes nonsense and ignores the visible "s" cious or worthless. (Of course many readers have always stroke (between the u and s of the overwritten "Because." understood Blake's Cromek.) "He has observd . . " (N 30) 2 del ?I ?sport Florentine Ingratitude (N 32) 21 merry hearted ?with ? Fortune ?merry ?Blithe & gay (E, not in K) / Fashion (EC) / warm hearted Fashion (K) / warm Hearted ?Sporting ?with fortune [words Meg] gay (B) / PSporting Fashion (B). B944 gets the capital H from mistaking a with Pgolden PFortune PBlithe & gay (C) descending "p" from the line above as part of the letter. "old acquaintance well renew" (N 24) i.e. The "y" of "merry" is quite visible. "we'll." This half line is written on top of an erased full A Pretty Epigram . . . B949 rightly corrects line beginning "Look Pwhat [or Phow]" and continuing E789 (and N 38); the suggested first and second "Flaxman & Stothard do" (EC, not in K; B "can read only titles, deleted, are not there. The second, "Major 'Stothard' with confidence"). C868 suggests that Blake Testament of " is (notes B) a misreading of may have meant to retain the first two words, to make the "the Entertainment of and an overlooking of the revised line read "Look how [or what] old acquaintance caret. C872 now reads: "Title revised in ms thus: A we'll renew." [Pretty Epigram for < the entertainment of> those who Mr Cromek to Mr Stothard (N31) 3 you have Given high Prices for Bad Pictures And ?have] Pretty travel all in vain (all texts) / B942 notes "'travel' might Epigram for [those] the Entertainment of those Who equally well be read as 'travil,' i.e. 'travail.'" Perhaps [pay] the margins to serve, physically and poetically, as E560/B1029-30/C571). B was right to question "an artist William Blake's announcement that he is about to quote who has carried on" (E&N) and to suggest "an Joseph. In C, then, we are printing, as Preface to the unending." And E had mistakenly dropped "The Fools main poem, first Blake's three couplets, then Joseph's hand or the" (KBC). two. The other "Comments on this Poem" (as we call p. 55 how then should (EKC) / . . . shall (B, sim• them) are printed at the end of the main text: "I am sure ple error) This Jesus will not do . . . " and "This was Spoke by My p. 57, 2nd parag: journeymen whose names (EKC) / Spectre" (a comment on the Philosophy section). journeyman whose name (B, compounded error). Line 58 (now 54 with the moving of "What can be p. 58, 1st parag. The "you/dey" mendings of the done ..." to the Preface) of this first section of the words of Gravelot, given incompletely in E, are given fully in poem proper (d in EK, k in BC) is a difficult palimpsest KBC. But KB treat the deleted "Aliamet" (ENC) as illegible. and has had a checkered career among transcribers: p. 60 Monopolizing Trader [whose whole] (C) / not the seraph hand (Sampson, noted in K921) / Lord previously deciphered, though B gives "whose." Further Caiaphas hand (E, 4th prtg) / the Caiaphas (?) hand (B) along: "Poco Pend" (EKB) / Poco Piud (C); "Drawn with / [the guilty] Lord Caiaphas hand (iVC). a firm < and decided > hand" (KEC) / "Drawn with a Line 31, section e: Wherefore has (KE) / has [t] (BC) firm hand <& decided >" (B, a misconstruction) In d:21 the deleted "End" is clearly (from the con• p. 17 Corregio & Titian (KB) / Corregio or Titian text) a start for "Ended"; thus: [End(ed)] (ENC) but (EC): technically, "or" written on top of "&" (N) [?End] (B) p. 44 to leave it before he has spoild it (EK) / . . . f:51 forgot your (KEC) / forgot our (B) leave off before . . . (BC) p. 18 It is the Fashion] written along the right BLAKE'S EXHIBITION AND CATALOGUE margin of the page, now broken off—but visible in the 1953 facsimile. B and C agree on the placement of this OF 1809 clause (after "a dark cavern"): E lacked it. K misplaced A Descriptive Catalogue "They Produce System & Monotony." p. 1 The Spiritual form of Nelson . . . wreathings p. 18 The two paragraphs beginning "Mr B repeats" are infolded] The Spirit of Nelson . . . folds are entangled have more fully reported deletions in C than E (and con• variant inscription on sketch (Butlin 650). (This textual cur with B). K is somewhat in agreement, but misreads note got lost from C on the way to press. It is cited in B, "Production of a Man" as "Product . . . ." from catalogue; in Butlin from original.) p. 20 every Body of Understanding must cry out (E) p. 2 ordering the Reaper] commanding the reaper I . . . [will] must cry out (K) / . . . [can(?)] [wilt] must variant inscription, on back of painting, but not in cry out (B) / [& sen[se] will] must cry out (C) / / Poco-Pen Blake's hand (nor spelling: ploughman and plough in• (K) / Poco Pen (EB) Poco Piu (C) stead of plowman and plow). Butlin suggests "Perhaps by p. 23 [That Painted as well as Sculptured Monu• Palmer" (Butlin 651). (Accepted in B as Blake's.) ments . . . ] Variants reported more fully in C. B ques• p. 27 whose whole delight is the destruction of men tions several readings, omits "the Plain unpainted" (KE) / . . . is in the . . . (BC) before "Those Sepulchurs," reads "dead Marble" as "dull(?) Marble"; but does also call attention to the mis• DESCRIPTIONS OF THE LAST JUDGMENT spelling "Sepulchures" in E. p. 25 destructive of the true Artist (KC) / . . . Art• A Vision of the Last Judgment (N68-93) ists (EB) p. 81 Brittanica (KE) / Britannica (B) / Brittannia (C: see note). THE MARGINALIA PUBLIC ADDRESS Annotation to Lavater's Aphorisms on Man Date corrected to 1788; underlining and bracketing Comparing Bentley's text and his arrangement of revised. the segments of Public Address has been helpful, though 248 beast & devil (KEC) / beast or devil (B1361) It in both respects C differs somewhat from B. would have been good to have more ample quotation of p. 51 [Engraved by William Blake tho Now Sur• Lavater in C, but R. J. Shroyer's facsimile edition (1980) rounded by Calumny & Envy] pencil inscription, deleted. fills that need. (EC) / Not mentioned in K; mentioned in B (1031 & One important correction has been made, in Blake's 1060) as "illegible." Easy to read in the Nfacsimile, how• note on blank page 225. The deletion given heretofore as ever, and included in the Blake Concordance. "& they converse with the spirit of God!" is corrected to "& p. 11, paragraph beginning "If Men of weak these are either Good or Evil" — a considerable difference. Capacities" is transcribed differently in each text (K591/ 11 false for weak (KE) / [ ^Doubtful] false for weak (BC) PAGE 12 BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 612 "six or seven words erased" (EC) —still undeci- Angle brackets < > to indicate Blake's inked ad• phered. ditions were only incompletely supplied in printings of E; Annotations to Swedenborg's Divine Love and they are all in place in C. Divine Wisdom C (639) includes a new, partially recovered, Blake Flyleaf: Good to others (K) / This Good to others annotation— on Malone's p. xxxviii, fns. 24 and 25. (EB) / Thus Good to others (C) p. 3 Ought not the Employers of Fools (K) / Ought 11 springs up in your thoughts (KB) / . . . thought not the < Artists &> Employers [Imbecillity] of Fools (E) (EC) / Ought not the haps worth noting (B has a garbled transcript and his For Blake's inscriptions on his Illustrations of the notes question several E readings, all now rechecked). Book of Job, we give a list of the verbal variants from his "Heaven To Hayley, May 4, 1804 (source Gilchrist Life) p. 501 "Klopstock" 30: Spell removed shd read ninefold spell .... p. 687 Incriptions shd read Inscriptions. younger than I have known him (BC) / younger than I p. 689 On design No 38 should follow On verso of No 36 . . . . knew him (K, silently revising) p. 727 the word "Hebrew" should not be followed by a colon. Letter 20, previously thought to be ca. 1800 to p. 729 Letter 27 After the 11th line this line was omitted: "Maries Hayley, is now dated Sept.-Oct. 1801, To Thomas Butts? at the Sepulcher. 4 The Death of the Virgin" (noted by Mary Lynn Johnson). E. B. Murray has cor• p. 789 Add to note the statement: John Grant has pointed out that the "Conclusion" should precede the "Application" (one cannot rected the date of letter 24 to Butts from "Jany 10, 1802" apply a conclusion until it has been reached). to 1803 (a slip of Blake's thought). p. 808 Af 32:15 In "Kerabim" Blake wrote Kaph for the first Hebrew letter instead of Khaph; our printer tried several times but missed. Recent Conjectural Attributions p. 814 Tiriel 1:28 serpents] serpents [?all] 1st rdg C785: tucked in at the last minute is a note telling of p. 863 "You dont believe . . . " 11: note shd read: After "said" Blake first wrote "Beli," a start for "Believe"; my previous rdg ("Rich") Sir Geoffrey's conjectural but confident attribution to has been corrected by G. E. Bentley, Jr. Blake of a 24-line poem "To the Nightingale" (about p. 881 [The Catalogue] Insert new note: which the note reflects the skepticism of the proofreading p. 1 The Spiritual form of Nelson . . . ] The Spirit of Nelson team) and another unknown poem reported by Keynes as . . . folds are entangled . . . variant inscription on sketch (Butlin 650) "a remarkable piece of Blakean doggerel written in pale p. 895 Seventh line from bottom "nothern" shd he "northern." blue watercolour with a brush" and "addressed to Mrs Index corrections: Butts." C does not give the texts of these poems; the lat• p. 978 Index entry "Her whole Life ..." shd read "nobly pend." ter has not been seen by any of us. p. 980 Joseph of Arimathea, incriptions shd read inscriptions p. 981 "Leave O leave . . . 6850 shd read t850 Errata emendata p. 982 Insert: Nightingale, To the 785 Misprints (and omissions) already noted in the first prin• p. 983 Poetical Sketches . . . t864 shd read t846 ting of The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake p. 985 "The Angel . . . borth" shd read". . . birth" p. 986 "The grand style of Cert . . ." shdread" ... of An 1982 (C). p. 3 NNR [b] The spacing of the "Therefore" sec p. 986 insert: "The Use of Money & its Wars" 687 tion should almost exactly follow Blake thus: p. 988 insert: To the Nightingale 785 Therefore God becomes as we are, Postscript on Blake's Hebrew lettering: that we may be as he is Stephen Mitchell points out that in Blake's 2d Job design (I.e., to isolate "Therefore" and "is" as one-liners. Alter• he misspells the Hebrew word for "angel" in "Angel of native, to follow exactly: the Divine Presence" (though he has it right in the Laocoon plate) and leaves out an aleph; so the word ap• Therefore pears to melekh (king) instead of mal'akh (angel), lead• God becomes as we are, that we ing Foster Damon to the mistaken conclusion that "The may be as he Hebrew letters beneath his name . . . identify [Satan] as is 'King Jehovah,'Job's false God." p. 121 Af 24[26]: 63 flutes shd read flutes [']. pi. 2, facing p. 273 is printed inside out in the paperback volume 1 but correctly in the hardbound. Pp. 395-413, 494-98, in Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ed., William p. 148 J 5:60 A misspelling: "Jersualem." Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon (Brown Univ. Press, 1969). 2 p. 1677 22; 25 This time "Jcrsualsm." The 1976 printing of K was checked thoroughly in the prepara• p. 271 Running head "THE GHOST OF ADEL"! tion of C; the 1979 printing reached me only after C had gone to p. 273 The first Hebrew letter in the transcript should be heh, not press, but a fairly complete collation of the passages in the present thay; Blake engraved it correctly. (Pointed out by Stephen Mitchell.) report revealed very few changes from K1976. Characteristic errors SUMMER 1983 BUKE AS ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY PAGE 15 that might have been corrected from E continue in 1979: "thoughts" liberate 'misprint'" that amused Blake (a contextual pun, accepted in for "thought" in Anno. Swedenborg p. 12; "Infinity" for "Infinite" in the C text as well). Still more curious is an unmentioned change in Anno. Swed. p. 40; America 5:3 retains "enclos'd" for "inclosd" and MHH 7:13, from "wholesome" back to Blake's "wholsom" (K151): there are no corrections of America c. The K text of The FourZoas re• curious because the K text is conscientiously normalized in spelling — mains frequently inadequate. On K268 "these" is not corrected to and indeed Blake's "Wholesom" in PA p. 19 is kept in normalized "them" in "I have murderd them"; "Or hover'd over" (K284:182) spelling ("Wholesome") in K599. Also, for instance, in FR 216 (K144) should read "Or hoverd oer"; "turned into cries" (K310) should read Blake's "beastial" (respected by Johnson's printer) remains normalized "turned to cries"; "better hope" (K355:547) should be "bitter hope"; (K144) as "bestial," and on K256 the Keynes "steadfast" is not changed "girded" (K370:504) is a mistake for "girded on"; "Aloud" (K380) a to Blake's "stedfast." misreading of "O Luvah." In the 3rd edition of the Letters (1980) It may be deduced from these and several other examples that the Keynes made several corrections—such as changing the date of letter K text of 1979 received only a very few touches of revision or correc• 56 (K859) from April to March and revising "Home" to "House" — that tion, quite possibly more spelling changes than I have noticed but prob• were not transferred to the K text. ably very few substantive changes, or none, except in the two passages The "1979" Preface mentions only two corrections (on pp. 184 called attention to in the Preface. The present collation, in short, can and 644 respectively: see below). The second of these is a surprising stand as a near equivalent to a collation of the 1979 as well as the one, replacing "worshipped" with "warshipped" as probably a "de• 1976 Keynes. The London Muse The Probable and the Victorian Poetic Responses to Marvelous the City Blake, Wordsworth, and the WILLIAM B. THESING Eighteenth-Century Critical This SAMLA Award-winning Tradition study is the first to focus on WALLACE JACKSON the extent and significance of "In a wise, pithy series of es• the response of Victorian Blake's Prophetic Psychology say chapters, Jackson clarifies poets to the city of London, BRENDA WEBSTER the 'mid-century revolution' including Blake, Wordsworth, A psychoanalytic study of the in relation to Augustan Hu• Tennyson, Clough, and Hop• writing and art of William manism before it and the Ro• kins as well as Buchanan, Blake and the first to attempt mantic revolution after. . . . Morris, Thomson, Wilde, a full-scale Freudian interpre• This is a book to read, fun as Henley, and Davidson. 256 tation of his work. 336 pages, it is to quote"—The Romantic pages. Cloth 0-8203-0619-3 68 illustrations. Cloth Movement, ELN. 224 pages. $20.00. 0-8203-0658-4 $27.50. Cloth 0-8203-0439-5 $16.00. "You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you were four years old and he put his head in at the window and set you a-screaming"—MRS. WILLIAM BLAKE. The University of Georgia Press % Athens, Georgia 30602 PAGE 16 BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 second (Beta) copied from Alpha by 1825.3 Alpha is known to have stayed in the same family throughout the MINUTE PARTICULARS nineteenth century, but the history of Beta is known only from recent times. It may have been Beta (or another, as yet untraced, contemporary facsimile) which C. P. Burney owned. Beta is colored with considerable im• agination and skill, but the text was somewhat carelessly Charles Parr Burney as a Blake Collector transcribed and was extensively covered by the coloring. G. E. Bentley, Jr. These facts may explain why Burney describes it as pri• marily "a Volume of . . . Drawings" and why he puts Charles Parr Burney (1785-1864), the grandson of Charles "Blake's" name in quotation marks; the designs and Burney (1726-1814) the musicologist and nephew of Fanny words are Blake's but the hand that held brush and pen Burney (1752-1840) the novelist, was a wealthy school• was not his. master and Archdeacon successively of St. Albans and of It would be pleasant to think that such a Blake Colchester. He is not known to have had any connection volume as Charles Parr Burney acquired from Colnaghi with William Blake, except for a letter which he wrote on about 1862 had remained in the family, but C. P. 29 September 1862 to D. P. Colnaghi the print dealer Burney's direct descendant Mr. John R. G. Comyn, who asking about has a number of Burney treasures including C. P. Burney a Volume of 'Blake's' eccentric, but very interesting sketchbooks, tells me that he has nothing of the kind, Drawings, accompanied by Verses, written with great and Professor Joyce Hemlow of McGill University, the care and in very minute characters,—which is now in 1 editor of Fanny Burney's letters and journals, who has my possession,—was purchased from you . . . - given me generous advice, can throw no more light on This "Blake" can only be the artist-poet (despite the the subject. Of all the possibilities among surviving quotation marks round his name), but no such "Volume" "Blake" works, the contemporary manuscript facsimile of of "Drawings, accompanied by Verses, written ... in the Songs (Beta) seems to me most plausible. very minute characters" by Blake is known to survive. 1 On the other hand, the work may not be a manuscript Quoted from the manuscript in Beinecke Library, Yale Univer• sity. Colnaghi's does not have records which extend back to this at all. In the nineteenth century Blake's etched works in il• period. The firm sold For Children: The Gates of Paradise (B) to the luminated printing were sometimes referred to as drawings. British Museum on 12 January 1862. For instance, in 1818 Coleridge wrote ofthe Drawings" 2 Blake Records (1969), pp. 252, 251. of that "strange publication" Songs of Innocence and of 3 See "Two Contemporary Facsimiles of Songs of Innocence and Experience? If Charles Parr Burney was similarly casual in ofExperience," Publications ofthe Bibliographical Society of America, 64 (1970), 450-63. In 1982, copy Alpha belongs to Mr. Paul Mellon confusing drawings and engravings, the volume he owned and Copy Beta to Mr. Justin Schiller. might be one of Blake's works in illuminated printing. Few of these have "Verses, written with great care and in very minute characters," but Songs of Innocence and of Experience seems to fit the description fairly well. Perhaps Burney owned a copy ofthe printed Songs. Or he An Emendation in "The Chimney Sweeper" could have had a copy of For the Sexes: The Gates of of Innocence Paradise (?1818) which has eighteen printed designs and some verses in a small hand. But no copy of either work Alexander S. Gourlay can be traced to Burney. It was also common to consider Blake's works in il• A curious variant in the text of "The Chimney Sweeper" luminated printing primarily as books of designs. Allan (Songs 12) in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Cunningham speaks ofthe "wild verses, which are scattered Copy AA (Fitzwilliam Museum), appears to have gone here and there" among the powerful designs of The Book unremarked in spite of the wide distribution of trans• ofUrizen, and he refers to America and Europe as being parencies of this copy by EP Microform. Blake's etched "plentifully seasoned with verse" {Blake Records, pp. text of line 20 ofthe poem reads, "He'd have God for his 487, 500). father & never want joy"; in Copy AA, however, the con• But the most likely candidate seems to be a traction "He'd" has been replaced by the word "But." "Volume" of "Drawings, accompanied by [Blake's] Though I have not examined the original, the EP trans• Verses, written ... in very minute characters" which is parency appears to reproduce the plate accurately. neither a printed work nor a manuscript by Blake. It may The transparency shows no evidence of erasure, but be a facsimile of Blake's Songs made by a contemporary the inking of the plate was uneven; in consequence, let• of the poet. There are two such manuscript copies, the ters are obscured by overinking and by underinking. The first (Alpha) apparently copied from Songs (P) and the large area washes further reduce legibility. Someone ap- SUMMER 1983 BLAKE AS ILLUSTMTED QUARTERLY PAGE 17 pears to have strengthened some letters with pen and ink officious to go to the trouble of carefully matching the of the same orange-red color used in printing, but the ink but sufficiently obtuse to make such an implausible result is not equal to the legibility of strengthened pages emendation. Because the word seems to have been added in late copies such as Copy Z (Rosenwald). The original so casually, and because the ink used matches the printing contraction, "He'd," has printed very poorly, but vestiges ink so closely (indeed, it could be a diluted form of the of the word are still visible beneath the word "But," printing ink), the emendation should probably be at• which has been supplied in the same orange-red ink.1 tributed to one of the Blakes or, as Erdman has suggested The upper right serif of the "H" can be seen protruding in correspondence, to an anonymous assistant in the from the upper lobe of the "B," the printed crossbar of the workshop. The task of retouching the text was no doubt "e" is visible in the written "u," and most of the ascender tedious, and it is likely that someone, working absent- of the "d" is evident to the right of the written "t," which mindedly, relied on an imperfect memory of the line has been formed along the curved bowl of the "d." rather than thoughtful consideration of the evidence in There are only a few textual alterations like this one making the unhelpful emendation.3 elsewhere in the Songs; most other known instances of 1 That the variant in AA is not a change in the plate is certain, for textual change attributable to Blake provide plausible the posthumous Copy b (Harvard) has the usual reading. See the Al• readings, and most are improvements on the etched text. bion Facsimile edition (Albion Facsimiles #1) (London and New York: An emendation that is mechanically similar to the one in 1947), n.p. This (as well as all other facsimiles of Harvard's b) should, AA has been adopted by both David V. Erdman and G. however, be used with caution; see below. 2 E. Bentley, Jr. in their editions of Blake's writings. This In addition to the variant in "The Clod and the Pebble" men• tioned in the text, four other Songs are emended in one or more change (from "sung" to "sang") in line 5 of "The Clod & copies: "A Cradle Song" (Songs 17), emended substantially in Copy/; the Pebble" (Songs 32), in Copy Z, has been accepted in "Night" (Songs 21), in Copy Q of Innocence (Erdman and Bentley dif• spite of the fact that it appears in only that copy, and could fer slightly as to which words are changed); and "The Tyger" (Songs have been accidental; Copy Z was finished at about the 42), in Copy P. Bentley also mentions an obviously inadvertent textual same time as AA and in a similar style.2 But the emenda• change in "On Another's Sorrow" (Songs 27), in Copy L of Innocence: the word "tear" in line 31 printed faintly and was covered by a painted tion in Copy AA should not be accorded the same degree leaf. Erdman's textual notes seem to imply that "The Blossom" (Songs of respect, for it is a patent corruption. By itself line 20 of 11) has been emended "in all copies issued by Blake." His assertion "The Chimney Sweeper" as emended in AA is not ob• that the text of "posthumous copies" reads "thy" rather than "my" in viously wrong, but in context it leaves the Angel's pro• line 6 is based on one of the unaccountably retouched facsimiles of mise incomplete and makes the sweeps' happy awakening Harvard's Copy b, in which "my" has been altered to "thy." That Copy b itself contains the usual reading has been demonstrated by Mary particularly abrupt: Ellen Reisner in "Folcroft Facsimile of the Songs" Blake Newsletter 40 And the Angel told Tom if he'd be a good boy, (Spring 1977), 130. See Erdman, The Complete Poetry and Prose of But have God for his father & never want joy. William Blake, newly rev. ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark California, 1982), and Bentley, William Blakes Writings, 2 vols. And got with our bags & our brushes to work. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). 3 In correspondence Erdman cites two instances in which re• Although this variant is not particularly meaningful touching has similarly corrupted the text of Jerusalem, Copy B, on in itself, it could well be authorial, and probably plates 17 and 18. These are mentioned in his textual notes, p. 809. originated in Blake's workshop. The plate appears to have Copy B of The Marriage of Heaven andHellcontains another instance printed so poorly that it is unlikely that it would have of sloppy retouching on plate 25: the word "chariots" is crudely written been issued without any retouching of the text, and all as "charots." strengthening (both accurate and inaccurate) appears to have been done with the same ink and in the same style. Whoever did it was certainly not paying close attention to Detail of Songs 12, Copy AA. Reproduced by permission of the the syntactic or printed evidence on the page; it is hard to Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. imagine an owner of the book who would be sufficiently ,'Atui' fcive_&ri^tol d &\*n ifj^'i kit % stood he get xntn our ba$£_£f otir'i&nAtfites VVorS SUMMER 1983 PAGE 18 BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY perhaps writing."3 However, in Songs of Innocence, Copy O, the figure is well defined. It is not Jesse, but a woman who holds a baby in her lap (illus. 1).4 This figure is clearly A Minute Particular in Blake's Songs of a deliberate variant, of interest not only because it may be unique among copies of the Songs, but also because it Innocence, Copy O demonstrates Blake's atypical attention to this minute Theresa M. Kelley particular in the "Introduction" of Songs of Innocence. Impressions of this plate that have not been retouched As several commentators have remarked, the eight tiny show, in the sixth vignette, a figure that appears to be sit• ting, the legs slightly crossed, and the left arm possibly vignettes or panels which frame the text of the "Introduc• 5 tion" in Blake's Songs of Innocence are difficult to deci• bent. Otherwise, little can be distinguished. A similar pher, if indeed they can be deciphered at all.1 Yet as a figure appears in retouched or tinted copies, although a group these vignettes are clearly derived, as Sir Geoffrey few exhibit variations in the definition of the arms and legs (illus. 2).6 In still other copies there is something — but Keynes has argued, from "a medieval manuscript illus• 7 trating the Tree of Jesse."2 With this antecedent in mind, it is unclear what —in the lap of the figure. Finally, two recent commentators have suggested that the sixth vig• Muir facsimiles respond with admirable inventiveness to the muddled as well as huddled figure of most copies by nette, the second from the top in the group of four to the 8 right of Blake's text, may be Jesse. David Erdman sum• altering its seated position or by having the figure stand. marized much of earlier commentary when he described Even in Innocence, Copy N, one of three copies which Blake produced shortly before and after Copy O, the this figure as "huddled" with "legs crossed, head on 9 hand; Jesse himself (suggests Essick) as in the Sistine figure is indistinct. Yet if the clearly depicted image of a fresco; or regarding or working at something in his lap, mother and child in Copy O is unusual in the context of SUMMER 1983 BLAKE AS ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY PAGE 19 other versions of the same plate, it is typical of its im• courtesy of the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at mediate context, Copy O, which displays extensive ink Austin. See Bentley, Blake Books, p. 409. 5 modeling of individual figures and designs, particularly Copies which show just the image printed from the copperplate or an image that is unretouched in the area of this vignette are: In• notable in the frontispiece, "Introduction," "The Little nocence, E (New York Public Library, Berg Collection), U (facsimile, Black Boy" (1 and 2), "The Little Boy Found," "The Songs of Innocence [Boston, 1883]) and Experience, C, b, h, A (fac• Chimney Sweeper," and "Night" (1). Together with appli• simile, Songs of Innocence [London: Ernest Benn, 1926]). I am in• cations of color specific to this copy, such modeling either debted to Robert N. Essick for descriptions of Innocence, U and Ex• perience, c, b, h, and AA (see below). gives sharper definition to principal figures or permits some 6 redefinition of smaller ones, as is the case with the "mother Copies which are retouched or tinted but still show the same image as that of the unretouched copies include: Innocence, B (fac• and child" vignette discussed here. Because there may be simile, London: Trianon, 1954), D and K (Morgan Library), I (repro• other variants of this figure in copies which I have not con• duced here as illus. 2 through the courtesy of the Henry E. Huntington sulted, this note invites additional notes and queries con• Library), N (Estelle Doheny Collection of the Laurence Doheny cerning the "Introduction" of Songs of Innocence. Memorial Library) and Experience, B (facsimile, David Bindman, The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake [N.Y.: Putnam, 1978], p. 217), E (Henry E. Huntington Library), I (reproduced in The Il• 1 See, for example, Edwin J. Ellis's introduction for the facsimile luminated Blake, p. 45), V (Morgan Library), Y (Metropolitan edition of Songs of Innocence and of Experience (London: Bernard Museum of New York), Z (facsimile, London: Trianon, 1967), AA. Quaritch, 1893), xviii. For easier reference, my citations of specific For additional information concerning the copies cited in these notes, volumes of the Songs follow G. E. Bentley Jr.'s practice of referring to see Bentley, Blake Books, pp. 365-438. Songs of Innocence as Innocence, and to Songs of Innocence and of 7 Two copies besides Innocence, O and possibly Experience, A A Experience as Experience (Blake Books, 1977). The Ellis facsimile is of (see Erdman's note concerning Essick's reading of this figure in The Experience, U. See Bentley, Blake Books, p. 436. Bentley describes the Illuminated Blake, p. 45) appear to show something in the lap of the vignette as "a man reading" in William Blake's Writings, 2 vols. (Oxford: figure: Experience, U (mentioned by Erdman, The Illuminated Blake, Clarendon, 1978), I, 24, and in Blake Books, p. 389. p. 45) and T (facsimile, Songs of Innocence and of Experience [Liver• 2 Keynes's commentary for Songs of Innocence and of Experience pool: Henry Young and Sons, 1923]). See Bentley, Blake Books, pp. (London: Trianon, 1967), pi. 4. Facsimile of Experience, Z. See 436 and 421. Bentley, Blake Books, p. 369. 8 Songs of Innocence and of Experience (facsimile ofInnocence, 3 Erdman's commentary for The Illuminated Blake (N.Y.: Anchor D [Edmonton: Muir, 1884]) and Songs of Innocence (Muir and Doubleday, 1974), p. 45. Facsimile of Innocence, I, with reference in this Trumble facsimile of Experience, A [London: Bernard Quaritch, instance to Experience, U. See Bentley, Blake Books, pp. 407 and 422. 1927]). See Bentley, Blake Books, pp. 434 and 488. 4 Songs of Innocence, O. Reproduced here as illus. 1 through the 9 See Bendey's chronological list of the Songs in Blake Books, p. 367. 1. "Introduction," Songs of Innocence copy O, reproduced by 2. "Introduction," Songs of Innocence copy I, reproduced by permission permission of the Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Austin. SUMMER 1983 PAGE 20 BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY boldness that always has an intrinsic poetic allure and sometimes a certain explanatory power. Frye has brilliantly REVIEWS scanned a vast corpus of literary texts, ancient and modern, spotting significant interconnections others have overlooked, or, at the very least, imaginatively arguing for the connections that have struck him. The Great Code, which he conceives as a "restatement" —and, implicitly, a kind of summation —of the critical outlook he has devel• oped over the past three decades, has moments of engaging wit and even penetrating insight, as one would expect from so intelligent a writer, but the project as a whole exposes an underlying weakness of Frye's predilection for schemata and networks of connection. A more accurate subtitle for the new book than the one it has been given would be "The Bible and Archetypes,"for one learns little here about literature, or about the Bible and literature, or about the Bible, though there is an elo• quent exposition, offered by a loyal modern adherent, of the traditional Christian typological view of the Bible. A good deal of space is devoted to rehearsing what is familiar from dozens of handbooks on the Bible or from the biblical texts themselves —ranging from paraphrases of the arguments of Ecclesiastes and Job to summaries of the Mesopotamian flood story and other ancient Near Eastern antecedents to the Bible. But when Frye is not re• viewing familiar material, what he says about the Bible generally proves to be at least a little misleading and some• times dead wrong. The basic problem —and I believe it is also a basic problem in his whole conception of literature — is that he is far too concerned with the comprehensive struc• ture of archetypes to attend with much discrimination to the differential structures of specific literary texts. For Frye, the individual case is finally interesting only to the degree in which it participates in the archetype; indeed, in some sense it is the archetype that validates the individual case for Northrop Frye. The Great Code: The Bible and him, that confirms its.status as literary expression. Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jova- Given this orientation, Christian typology becomes novich. 261 pp. $14.95. an ideally congenial way of organizing disparate texts, and in fact, The Great Code makes one wonder whether Reviewed by Robert Alter Christian typology may not have been the ultimate model on which Anatomy of Criticism was based. To be sure, Frye's frame of reference for typology is more modern anthropology than medieval theology. Writing with a sense of historical perspective, he does not seriously Since The Great Code for the most part has the unfortunate imagine that the authors of the tale of the binding of effect of revealing the defects of its author's virtues, some• Isaac in Genesis and of the dead and resuscitated son of thing should be said first about those virtues. Northrop the Shunamite woman in Kings were explicitly adum• Frye, long before the new wave of literary theory, was the brating the story of the crucifixion and resurrection. But first widely influential critic writing in English to conceive in the logic of his system, those earlier tales of threatened literature as a system and to try to define the intricacies of and saved sons are structurally subsumed under the its workings systematically. He has exhibited a Viconian Christ story, in a way "fulfilled" through it because the crucifixion and resurrection perfectly realize, and thus deftness in the articulation of historical and generic sche• make perfectly transparent, the implicit archetypicality of mata (Vico in fact is given some prominence in the first the Old Testament tales. "The two testaments," Frye af• chapter of the new book), spelling out the stages and as• firms, "form a double mirror, each reflecting the other pects of his sundry literary cycles and sequences with a SUMMER 1983 BLAKE A\ ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY PAGE 21 but neither the world outside." I think this formulation the remarkable clash between David and his wife Michal discards the problem of referentiality in the Bible too on his triumphant entrance into Jerusalem, dancing and readily, but I would like to address myself particularly to cavorting before the Ark of the Covenant. She rebukes the distortions involved in Frye's viewing the Old Testa• him for exposing himself (apparently, in the sexual ment in the conviction that it should be imagined as one sense); he retorts sarcastically by saying he will make him• panel in a diptych mirror. self as lowly as he pleases, for he, and not her father's To begin with, everything must be seen as ordered house, has been chosen to rule. Now, for Frye, it is im• progression moving from Old to New. Thus, he proposes portant to assimilate this story to the supposed archetype seven "phases" of biblical literature forming a causal and of the humiliated king because then it becomes a typo• chronological sequence: creation, revolution, law, wis• logical anticipation of the crucifixion. But the only way to dom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse. Any careful reach such a reading is by ignoring all the rich details of the scrutiny of the actual evolution of biblical religion and story, which is manifestly about the explosively loaded the complicated history of the production of the sundry marital and political relationship between David and biblical texts will reveal that this sequence — most trans• Michal that has evolved over many years and has nothing parently, in the three middle phases —does not reflect a whatever to do with rituals of royal humiliation. diachronic process at all but only Frye's rhetorical in• There are more instances than I can take space to genuity. Similarly, Frye proposes a biblical "structure of enumerate of such wrenching of literary materials out of imagery" —"demonic," "analogical," and "apocalyptic" — their defining contexts into the more edifying and obfus• moving in grand progression away from "the oasis imagery cating context of archetypal schemata. Metaphors are in• of trees and water" in Eden through pastoral, agricultural, vented and then said to inform the text. Thus, Frye suggests and then urban imagery, and finally back to a new Eden. that the "beginning" introduced in Genesis 1 is not birth Again the variegated data of the texts suggest nothing but "rather the moment of waking from sleep," an inter• like this orderly "structure." The biblical poets referred to esting enough idea nowhere intimated in the text but oases and gardens and sheep and vineyards because these which is said to be "the central metaphor underlying" the were part of the reality they inhabited; they also referred biblical creation. The keyword hebel{NS "vanity") in Ec- to glassmaking and ceramics and architecture and laundry clesiastes, which means the breath of one's mouth, or processes, but Frye passes over these in silence because vapor —that is, something fleeting and insubstantial —is they do not neatly confirm his schema. If the biblical said to mean, on no philological authority, "dense fog," writers had had bicycles and refrigerators, they would so that it can play a symbolic role against light in the ar• have also made those part of their stockpile of metaphors. chetypal system Frye proposes for Ecclesiastes. For Frye, however, the final source of the image is the ar• Let me offer one final example. Reading Job with chetype, not reality. Thus, when the first Psalm compares Christian, typological eyes, Frye asserts that "Job lives in the righteous man to "a tree planted by rivers of water," enemy territory, in the embraces of heathen and Satanic Frye immediately perceives this as "the paradisal imagery power which is symbolically the belly of the leviathan, of trees and water." But there is nothing at all paradisal in the endless extent of time and space." Every element of the distinctly this-worldly, non-mythological poem that is this statement Jiappens to be false. There are no heathen Psalm 1, and the simile is invoked because everyone living in this scrupulously monotheistic book. There is equally in the Near Eastern climate and topography knew that no "Satanic power" in Job: the Adversary or Prosecuting only a tree planted close to a source of fresh water could Attorney (he is never designated with a proper name in have healthy roots and hope to flourish. the Hebrew) is not the Satan of Christian demonology A good many of the archetypal misreadings are and has no "territory" or power independent of God. A graver than this. Frye sees traces of an Oedipus myth in figure of ancient Near Eastern folklore rather than of the creation of Adam, "whose 'mother,' so far as he had mythology proper, he is one of a vaguely conceived crowd one, was the feminine adamah or dust of the ground, to of benei elohim, divine beings, with a specific function of whose body he returned after breaking the link with his oppositionalism in the narrative. It is only later tradition father." This is imaginative but perverse. The story presents that will develop him into the Prince of Evil. The Book of God as Adam's fashioner, never as his father; there are no Job is concerned obsessively with man's finitude and not textual hints of anything maternal about the earth which, at all with endless time and space, and I fail to see by far from being a submerged Gaea-Tellus, is represented what mental gyration Job could be said to be living in the here as mere raw material for man's construction; and in a belly of the leviathan. language where all nouns have gender, the fact that Yet Frye goes on to conclude about the ending of the adamah is feminine (as is also, for example, the biblical book: "The fact that God can point out these monsters word for sword) hardly suggests in itself female identity. [leviathan and behemoth] to Job means that Job is out• Frye cites a Babylonian ritual of ceremonial humilia• side them, and no longer under their power." Frye of tion of the king by the high priest as an explanation for course exhibits an archetypal kneejerk response to PAGE 22 BLAKE AS ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 leviathan and behemoth, assuming, because leviathan is elsewhere mythological, that they must both be myth• ological and demonic creatures in the Book of Job. But, if one really bothers to read the context, it is perfectly clear that these two strange beasts are part of a grand zoological catalogue, that they are the crocodile and the hippopot• amus, quite realistically rendered in many respects, though with a degree of poetic hyperbole that draws on mythology for heightening effects. The poet's point is that both are exotic and uncanny beasts dwelling along the Nile, far from Job's observation, and thus are vividly part of that vast panorama of creation beyond his ken. In any case, they are not represented in the poem as evil; on the contrary, they are objects of God's providential super• vision as Creator; and in no sense could anything that preceded lead us to imagine Job was ever in either of their bellies, figuratively or otherwise. One could hardly have invented a clearer case in which the adhesion to arche• types has led a gifted mind to drastic misreading. Individual literary texts, of course, cannot be read in isolation. Literature is certainly a cumulative tradition and, as Frye has so often argued, an endlessly cross-refer- ental system. But by fixing above all on the system, we may forget to look for what the individual text gives us that is fresh, surprising, subtly or startlingly innovative, and that, alas, is the fault illustrated page after page in Raymond Lister. George Richmond. A Critical The Great Code. Biography. London: Robin Garton Ltd., 1981. $40.00. William L. Pressly. The Life and Art of James Barry. New Haven and London: Published for The Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1981. $65.00. Reviewed by Shelley M. Bennett In recent years there has been a remarkable increase in the quantity and quality of serious studies of British art. This upsurge is undoubtedly related to the rather belated growth of this area as an academic discipline. The mag• nificent new Yale Center for British Art and the lavish publications of the Yale University Press have further broadened general exposure to English art and fostered a more enlightened appreciation of this subject. Mono• graphs by William Pressly and by Raymond Lister now add to this growing wealth of knowledge about British art. Because this is a relatively new scholarly field, the need for basic information, which both books so gener• ously supply, is still of critical importance. Lister's George Richmond, A Critical Biography, for example, is founded SUMMER 1983 BLAKE AS ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY PAGE 23 on heretofore inaccessible Richmond diaries and family style, subject matter, or the historical context of his art. manuscripts. For the most part, Lister limits himself to a William Pressly's The Life and Art of James Barry is a biographical account based on condensations and sum• more intensive art historical study. In addition to pro• mations of the diary entries. A concluding chapter deals viding a full biographical account of Barry's life, Pressly is more specifically with his art, while a very useful appen• concerned with relating Barry's art to the general develop• dix lists all his known portraits. ments in English art. This is particularly appropriate and In his own day, George Richmond, R. A. (1809-1896) relevant, for Barry was a central figure in the flowering of was best known for his fashionable portraits of eminent an internationally renowned school of English painting in Victorians, through which he gained both financial and the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. social success. He also painted narrative subjects and James Barry (1741-1806) shared the concern of his landscapes, primarily for his own amusement, and receiv• fellow artists during this period with improving the status ed some critical acclaim for his work in art restoration. He of English art and of English artists. To do so, Barry is best known today, however, for his connection with directed his artistic energies to promoting an English William Blake. Richmond was one of the young group of school of history painting, the subject matter held in high• disciples, which included Samuel Palmer and Edward est esteem by his contemporaries. His efforts in this public Calvert, who gathered around Blake in the last years of arena culminated in his intricate, intellectual mural pro• his life. For a brief period, in the late 1820s and early gram in the Society of Arts rooms in the Adelphi, executed 1830s, Richmond was deeply influenced by the art of his at great personal cost ("Barry told me that while he Did that mentor. Of the Shoreham circle of artists, his art was in Work —he Lived on Bread & Apples," writes Blake in his many ways closest to Blake's. In Richmond's early draw• "Annotations to Reynolds" —"O Society for Encourage• ings and prints, as in Blake's art, anatomical accuracy and ment of Art"!). convincing spatial foreshortening have been sacrificed in In addition to creating history paintings in the grand order to maximize the flow of the taut, bounding out• manner, Barry, like many of his fellow artists, began to lines. Contour lines sharply define the forms and create expand the scope of art, turning to new subjects ranging rhythmic, expressive patterns across the surface of both from literature, classical mythology and early British artists' work. Furthermore, Richmond relies on a figure history to contemporary politics and portraiture. Like• type that is very reminiscent of Blake's distinctive manner of wise, to enlarge the emotional gamut of his art, Barry depicting the human body. However, Richmond, unlike developed a wide variety of styles, making adjustments in Blake, was concerned with a more traditional, Christian im• his style for different subjects. Barry's conscious manipula• agery, as was the Shoreham circle as a whole, reflecting tion of style for a variety of expressive effects in his paintings, their rather conventional views. Richmond's early vi• drawings and prints provides an important link between sionary works represent a nostalgic, spiritual world of contemporary English art and esthetic theory, particularly private fantasy quite different from Blake's. as formulated by his early patron Edmund Burke in his Lister's book is the first monograph devoted exclu• influential treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the sively to this artist of Blake's circle. Prior to its publica• Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime andBeautiful(17'57). tion, the only existing information on Richmond was to Furthermore, his experiments with the expressive poten• be found in a few, rather meager articles and in A. M. W. tial of line were influential in the evolution of an abstract Stirling's edition of The Richmond Papers (1926), which linear style in the hands of Blake, Flaxman, and Stothard. is concerned primarily with Richmond's son. In addition Pressly's monograph grows out of his dissertation on to providing a vast new body of biographical information the same topic (1973) and represents years of intensive about Richmond, Lister amends several incorrect accounts study based upon a wide array of primary and secondary recorded by Stirling. Of particular use is the list in Ap• sources. Though preceded by a dissertation by Robert pendix I of Richmond's approximately 2500 portraits, Wark (1952) and by two master's theses, by Charles including prices when known. This compilation is based Kriebel (1966) and David Solkin (1974), Pressly's study is on manuscript material provided by the Richmond family. the first full scale treatment to reach publication since Students of British art will be especially grateful to Lister Edward Fryer's early nineteenth century account. It sup• for this new factual material. The numerous illustrations plements the previous studies with new information, par• of Richmond's works from his early visionary period supply ticularly concerning Barry's prints. As a readily accessible valuable information about this artist. One is very source on this important English artist, it will be of assist• thankful to now have this visual material so readily avail• ance in all future studies of the art of this period. able. Lister's analysis of Richmond's art, on the other Pressly has arranged the book in a general chron• hand, provides few new insights, particularly in regard to the ological sequence. Within each chapter, he expands upon portraits. Lister has quite meticulously noted Richmond's various themes, such as Barry's formation as a history specific borrowings and quotations from other artists, painter, his portraits and politics, his Society of Arts pro• especially Blake, but he goes little further in analyzing his gram, etc. As Pressly states in his preface, his goal has PAGE 24 BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 been "to present a detailed iconographical and stylistic study of Barry's work that takes into account his forceful FLAXMANSIIUUSTRATOSIS and idiosyncratic personality as well as the impact of con• TO HOMER temporary social, political, and theoretical issues." On Drawn by John Flaxman the whole, Pressly does an admirable job in fulfilling his aim; however, on occasion, the emphasis falls rather too Engraved by William Blake and Others heavily on an analysis of Barry's tempestuous personality. A more balanced perspective could have been achieved if Pressly had presented the reader from the beginning with a broader view of the art historical context rather than relegating it to the conclusion. This would have been of particular help in clarifying Barry's contributions to the stylistic developments associated with English romantic art. Likewise, the study would have profited by a more thorough discussion of such pertinent issues as how Barry's works were perceived by his contemporaries. Who was his audience and, more importantly, who bought his prints? Pressly tells us that Barry's prints were the chief means by which he supported himself and the one area in which he was able to reach an audience successfully. Were his prints given a different reading than his full scale oils, which were, for the most part, undervalued in his own day? This line of pursuit would have set Barry squarely in the context of his times. Pressly, nonetheless, provides the reader with an invaluable amount of new in• formation about both Barry and English art in general in Essick and La Belle, eds. Flaxman's Illustrations the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pressly supplements the monograph with various to Homer. Dover, 1977. helpful appendices including a catalogue raisonne of Barry's paintings, drawings and prints. Unlike earlier Reviewed by Janet Warner listings of Barry's works, Pressly's catalogue is conveniently arranged by subject rather than collection and arranged chronologically within each section. Copious illustrations This edition of Flaxman's designs to Homer was pub• further enhance the value of this handsomely produced lished five years ago and has become a most useful book. Pressly's lucid manner of writing makes this ex• reference book for anyone interested in sources of cellent scholarly text a pleasure to read. English neo-classical design. Robert Essick and Jenijoy LaBelle provide a scholarly and pertinent introduction, a useful annotated bibliography chronologically arranged, and just enough commentary on each design to identify it and suggest its relation to Blake's and other artists' treatments of similar subjects. The reproductions of the outline designs are very clear, even perhaps a little more highly contrasted than the originals I have been able to compare them with. The editors note the favorable reception of the designs from their first appearance in 1793, and their undeniable in• fluence on motif and style in nineteenth-century Europe. Irreverently, I was reminded of the twentieth-century comic strip (see Scylla, Odyssey, plate 20): should we blame Flaxman for this? The flattened plane and economy of line of the illustrations appeal to the taste of the modern viewer more than does the classical subject SUMMER 1983 BL\KE AS ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY PAGE 25 matter. One can see the genesis of the relief decoration of playing ten parts each, with the actresses all compelled to so many 1930s buildings, and many of the lines of Art play male parts, one pleasant effect of which was, ap• Deco furniture in these illustrations. parently, the adaptation of the character of Tom Paine to a womanish figure. To compensate, Mary Wollstonecraft appeared as a very mannish feminist who made a deter• mined assault on Blake's virtue, Fuseli being inexplicably absent from Johnson's radical circle. The entertainment consisted essentially of a number of Blake's songs, set charmingly to music and, alas, all scrannelly sung, inter• spersed with travestied episodes from Blake's life and il• luminated by a double-screen slide projection, some of the slides being rare and excellent, some well-known ones appearing reversed, including the Europe frontispiece. Additions to the Blake Apocrypha All of those Blakean purists who could not bear the heresies of Adrian Mitchell's Tyger would have stormed Blake, a play written and directed by Grant from the small Sheridan Theatre breathing threats of Hehir. Music by Bruce Stewart. Performed libel, but we are all so civilized in Adelaide (that is to say, we do not take art seriously here), and it was such a pleas• at the Sheridan Theatre, Adelaide, Australia, ant warm night, and the whole enterprise was so patently 4-20 March 1982. harmless in such of its intentions as could be inferred, that even I sat back and chuckled at each fresh absurdity Reviewed by Michael J. Tolley and clapped with the others at the end of each act (there was an interval of fifteen minutes for refreshments: superb orange juice for 40 cents or, in this renowned wine state, plonk for 50). The unsuspecting credulous members of the au• Adelaide, Australia, has a biennial Arts Festival in March dience would have left believing some curious apocryphal and this Festival has developed a Fringe and among the facts. Among these are the idea that Blake was, indeed, Fringe activities in March 1982 was a play called Blake, mad, though this was partly the fault of Hidson who, written and directed by Grant Hehir, with music by however, provided Blake with the experience which led to Bruce Stewart. This play was performed at the Sheridan the doctrine of contraries; that the girl he first courted Theatre on eleven occasions from 4-20 March; I attended was a tartish model called Polly from the life class at the the final performance. Royal Academy where he studied with Rowlandson and argued with Reynolds about painting from imagination; The play began promisingly enough with a harangue that he went to Felpham as an expedient to avoid accepting from a Russian, then one from an Anglican clergyman, the position of Royal Engraver (selected by the mad who were both led, in celebrating Blake's 1957 bicentenary, George III on the blind-dab-at-a-moving-list principle), to make the claim that he was the greatest genius who where Mr. and Mrs. Hayley first introduced themselves to ever lived; they were then mocked by a sly bearded rogue him and Catherine (Mrs. Hayley remaining visibly alive calling himself John Joseph Hidson (the star of the show), and well through the whole trial for sedition); that it was who claimed to be the cynical alter ego Blake alone could to rescue Catherine from a sexual assault of the drunken see in his life, a life Hidson bedeviled. Thus we were Schofield that Blake grappled with the trooper and prepared for amusing situation comedy of the type in ejected him from his garden; that Blake was saved from which Blake, courting Polly or being patronized by Sir hanging or worse (transportation to Australia) from a Joshua Reynolds, was goaded into shouting rudely at an hostile judge largely by the Royal-Engraver-selection invisible interlocutor. In his own person, Blake appeared story; that thereafter Coleridge befriended him, meeting as a morose, doubting coward, unluckily bearing a bald him at the womanish Charles Lamb's house, in the inter• patch from his tender years and not even allowed a red vals of insulting Wordsworth (Coleridge misremembered flourishing wig. Blake's poetry but Blake capped him with a word-perfect This was a production that breathed the spirit of recollection of "Kubla Khan"); that Blake died alone, amateurism, which a full house enjoyed at $4.50 a head. chanting (partly under Parry's inspiration) the famous lyric Eight performers handled all the characters deemed neces• "And did those feet," which he wrote on his deathbed. sary in a rough representation of Blake's life, two of them PAGE 26 BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 refuted on page 344). The Clarendon Press, however, continues to turn out an inferior physical artifact. My review copy contains two cognate leaves, comprising pages The Letters and 79-82, that have never been sewn in at all and arrived laid in the book, completely unattached to the binding. It Prose Writings of appears that the same kind of workmen are producing Clarendon's books and New York City's buses and subway cars. One cannot be killed by a badly manufactured edi• tion of Cowper's Letters, but the question remains to why WILLIAM anyone should have to pay $98 per volume to buy one. If, however, you have the good fortune to hold a copy together long enough to read it, this second volume COWPER contains a fund of valuable information on the craft of writing verse and the process of publishing it in the 1780s (and for some years thereafter), as well as a treasury of marvelous anecdotes illustrative of the daily life and social mores of England on the eve of the French Revolu• Volume III 1787—1791 tion. Besides all these pragmatic attractions, Cowper's letters are among the very wittiest and most interesting I've ever read. Though they lack the apparent spontaneity of Byron's and Lamb's, they offer the reader glimpses of a gentleman writing, in varied tones appropriate to his EDITED BY relationships with his correspondents, on the whole range of religious, political, social, literary, and personal con• JAMES KING AND cerns that characterized the period. It thus provides both CHARLES RYSKAMP a self-portrait of the artist at work by the leading poetic talent in England2.x. the time (Burns was in Scotland) and holds up a mirror to the social conditions of the age. Let me illustrate, first, the kind of social understand• ing these letters provide. For one thing, both justice and lawlessness in the period seem to have been directed at James King and Charles Ryskamp, eds. The particular persons. In March 1783, Cowper tells that there Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper. Vol. passed through Olney "a body of Highlanders" who II: Letters, 1782-1876. Oxford: Clarendon lately mutinied at Portsmouth. Convinced to a Press, 1981. xxviii + 652 pp. $98.00. man, that General Murray had sold them to the East India Company, they breath nothing but vengeance, and swear they will pull down his Reviewed by Donald H. Reiman house in Scotland as soon as they arrive there . . . . as Men, if their charge against the General be well supported, I cannot blame them. . . . None of their principal Officers are with them; either conscious of guilt, or . . . suspected as In discussing the first volume of this edition of Cowper's . . . partners in the iniquitous bargain, they fear letters (reviewed together with the first volume of the resentment of the corps. . . . General Cowper's Poems in Blake, 15, 149-51), I highly praised Murray's scull was in some danger among them, the quality of Cowper's letters and their value for students for he was twice felled to the ground with the Butt end of a Musquet. The Sergeant Major rescued of Blake and the Romantic poets and commended the him, or he would have been for ever render'd in• editorial principles and textual accuracy of the volume. capable of selling Highlanders to the India Com• At the same time, I questioned some of the editors' anno• pany, (pp. 113-14) tations, and I severely criticized the Clarendon Press's Not only Cowper, but the government decided that the production procedures and standards. At the outset of Highlanders were in the right and discharged the men in• this review, let me say that the intelligent editorial prin• stead of punishing them. On their way north, they at• ciples and the high standard of textual accuracy continue tended various evangelical churches, well received by in Volume II and that the annotation has markedly im• the people. proved (though there are, inevitably, small slips, as on page 343, where the poem quoted in fn. 3 is marred by a In November 1783, Cowper reports the first of a typo and where fn. 4 contains a speculation apparently series of fires set by arsonists, who used the confusion to SUMMER 1983 BLAKE AS ILLUSTR.ATED QUARTERLY PAGE 27 steal things when people abandoned their houses or carried such an abused young child). He could, however, feel the their valuables outside. "George Griggs is the principal pangs of hunger and cold that afflicted the poor of Olney sufferer. He gave 18 Guineas or nearly that Sum to a and did his best to raise money from wealthy friends to woman whom in his hurry he mistook for his wife .... relieve their sufferings (see, for example, pp. xxvi, 86-87, He has likewise lost 40 pounds worth of wool" (p. 176). 91, 94-95, and 328-29). Two weeks later, Cowper writes again: Of all Cowper's sympathies, his religious and polit• The Country around us is much alarm'd with ap• ical ones are the most interesting because they show the prehensions of fire. Two have happen'd since That contrast between his (and his age's) thinking on these of Olney. One at Hitchin, where the damage is matters and the ideals of the later Romantics. That some• said to amount to 11,000 £ . . . . Since our Con• flagration here, we have sent two Women and a one was pious or religious and lived morally were more Boy to the Justice for depredation. Sue Riviss for important to Cowper at this point than what religion one stealing a piece of Beef, which, in her excuse, she espoused. We find him not only being cordial to the said she intended to take care of. This Lady . . . Throckmortons, neighboring Roman Catholic gentry, but escaped for want of evidence. Not that evidence was indeed wanting, but Our men of Goatham also encouraging the Rev. William Unwin to develop ties judged it unnecessary to send it. With her, went with Lord Petre, his Catholic neighbor. Cowper gives aid [another woman who had] filled her apron with and comfort to all persons who seem to be religious but wearing apparel, which she likewise intended to withdraws his approval as soon as he learns that they are take care of. She would have gone to the County licentious, or hypocritical, or unduly avaricious. He leaves Gaol, had Billy Raban, the Baker's son, who pros• ecuted, insisted upon it. But He . . . interposed final judgment to God —but he assumes that God does in her favor and begg'd her off. The young Gentle• and will judge, and that, therefore, people need not exert man who accompanied these fair ones, is the themselves to punish vice on earth. (All being sinners, all Junior Son of Molly Boswell. He had stolen some stand rather equally in need of punishment anyway.) Iron work the property of Griggs the Butcher. Being convicted he was order'd to be whipt .... He Cowper, therefore, though he fears robbers and incen• seem'd to show great fortitude but it was all an im• diaries, does not show an inclination to organize counter- position upon the public. The Beedle who per- measures or to call out for improved earthly justice. form'd it had filled his left hand with red Ocre, This same quietistic attitude also governs his polit• through which after every stroke he drew the lash ical thinking. He roundly condemns parliament more of his whip, leaving the appearance of a wound upon the skin, but in reality not hurting him at all. This than once for overtaxing the poor and for producing no being perceived by Mr. Constable Henshcomb benefits for the people. But rather than seeking reform, . . . , he applied his cane without any such he falls back on his faith that God ultimately governs and management or precaution to the shoulders of the judges all human affairs (see, for example, pp. 103-105). too mercifull Executioner. The scene immediately became more interesting, the Beedle could by no On the one occasion when a parliamentary candidate calls means be prevailed upon to strike hard, which on him and solicits his influence, Cowper does not discuss provoked the Constable to strike harder, and this the candidate's qualifications or the issues, but assures double flogging continued, 'till a Lass of Silver the man that — contrary to the testimony of his Olney End, pitying the pitiful Beedle thus suffering neighbors —he has no influence with the enfranchised under the hands of the pitiless Constable, joined the procession, and placing herself immediately freeholders (see pp. 229-30). behind the latter, seized him by his capillary Club One of the most delightful discoveries in this and pulling him backward by the same, slapt his volume is how excited Cowper and, indeed, all the gentry face with a most Amazonian fury. This Concatena• with whom he corresponded became about the new tion of events has taken up more of my paper than experiments with hot-air balloons, which in• I intended it should, but I could not forbear to in• form you how the Beedle thresh'd the thief, the terest—though not easily traceable in a volume with an Constable the Beedle, and the Lady the Con• index only of proper names —forms one of the staple stable, and how the thief was the only person con- topics of his correspondence. One of the least edifying cern'd, who suffer'd nothing, (pp. 180-81) surprises is Cowper's strong objection to a concert com• There are numerous other incidents of similar inter• memorating the hundredth anniversary of Handel's birth est, including two situations in which married men are because, as "a religious service instituted in honor of a accused — and assumed to be guilty — of having sexual re• Musician, and performed in the house of God" (p. 254), lations with a ten-year-old girl (p. 251) and with young it bordered on sacrilege. boys, respectively (p. 314). In each case, Cowper and, But the chief interest of this volume, beyond the presumably, the community seem to pity the men (who brilliant portraiture of the writer and his friends, lies in are removed from their churches) and their families more Cowper's response to the growing reputation of Poems than the children involved. Cowper, indeed, seemed to and John Gilpin, his writing and publication of The Task have only limited sympathy for those in whose situations volume, and his embarkation on the translation of he cannot imagine himself (such as being the parent of Homer. Cowper's remarks ought to show Romanticists PAGE 28 BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 clearly the distinction in attitudes that separated professional that, though Defoe and Dr. Johnson (to say nothing of literary men such as Dr. Johnson from those, including numerous hacks) had earned their livings for periods of Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley, time from their publications, in Blake's day the thought who began publishing not to earn a living but to was still something of a novelty for a serious poet. There• disseminate their views or to win literary fame. Cowper fore, Blake's or Shelley's or Keats' unsuccess as a com• himself comments on the distinction in remarks on mercial author signified nothing in itself, but came back Johnson's Lives of the Poets: Cowper himself, who reads to bother the three only in their self-comparisons with merely for his amusement, ... is pleased with the phenomenal success of Lord Byron, whom they rec• what is really pleasing, and is not over curious to ognized to be a great poet as well as a prolific and discover a blemish .... But if he once becomes popular one. Most serious writers of Blake's early years a critic by trade, the case is altered. He must then expected to find the means to live by inheritance or . . . establish, if he can, an opinion in every patronage (Cowper combined these to live modestly), or mind, of his uncommon discernment, and his ex• quisite taste. This great end, he can never accom• by achieving some post in church, university, or govern• plish by thinking in the track that has been beaten ment. The only poets of the Romantic period who at• . . . . He must endeavour to convince the world, tempted to live on earnings from their writings were that their favourite authors have more faults than Sou they, Moore, Hunt, and —with great unhappiness they are aware of, and such as they have never during his journalistic period —Coleridge. None could suspected, (p. 9) continue long to write ambitious non-occasional poems The key phrase here is "critic by trade," which, like iden• under these circumstances. tifying a person as being in any other "trade," marked Cowper's attention to the details of his poetry was him or her as being beneath the level of a gentleman. like that of other non-commercial poets, though Cowper Cowper, as gentleman author, was very much con• confined his attention to the texts of the poems —the dic• cerned with the details and fine points of his writing, its tion, punctuation, and orthography, even down to the production, the reactions of his friends and acquaintances use of elisions — rather than to the visual presentation to it, and —to a lesser extent —the reputation it gained (which was of concern not only to Blake but, to a lesser from the reviews of "critics by trade." Cowper seems extent, to Wordsworth and Shelley). An examination of neither to have expected nor received any money from his some of Cowper's statements in this volume about details Poems (1782) or The Task (1785). In February 1783, of orthography should dispel any lingering notions Cowper says that he hasn't heard from Joseph Johnson that — at least for the serious poets of the eighteenth and about the earlier volume since publication (p. 107) and nineteenth centuries —such matters were willingly left to when in October 1784, apparently still ignorant of the compositors and proofreaders. For example, in writing to sales of Poems, he asked William Unwin to approach Joseph Johnson about the proofs of Poems (1782), Johnson about publishing The Task, he cautioned him: Cowper says: "I have made some othe[r corjections, If when you make the offer of my book to which though they be for the most part bu[t ] a Letter Johnson, he should stroak his chin and look up to or a Stop, are yet such as were very necessary either to the the cieling and cry Humph! anticipate him I Expression or the Sense" (p. 14; see also p. 22). Four years beseech you at once, by saying that you know I should be sorry that he should undertake for me to later, regarding his translation of Homer, Cowper raised his own disadvantage, or that my volume should an even smaller matter: "As to those elisions of the vowel be in any degree press'd upon him. . . . The Idea before a vowel, . . . they are of the very essence of the of being hawked about ... is insupportable. manner, that I have adopted, and in my judgment are no Nicols I have heard is the most learned Printer of blemishes" (p. 472). To this statement, King and Ryskamp the present day. He may be a man of taste as well key a very valuable note that quotes "the Preface to the as of learning .... He prints the Gentleman's Magazine, and may serve us if the others should second edition of his Homer (p. xlvii, 1802)" upon the ar• decline. If not, give yourself no further trouble ticle the: about the matter, (pp. 286-87) . . . when this article precedes a vowel, shall [an Only by late December 1785, when Cowper described author] melt it into the substantive, or leave the himself to the playwright George Colman the Elder as hiatus open? Both practises are offensive to a "Once an Author and always an Author" (he had em• delicate ear. The particle absorbed occasions harsh• barked on his translation of Homer), did he turn his ness, and the open vowel a vacuity equally incon• venient. Sometimes, therefore, to leave it open, thoughts to money: "Hitherto I have given away my and sometimes to engraft it into its adjunct seems Copies, but having indulged myself in that frolic twice, I more adviseablc; this course Mr. Pope has taken, now mean to try whether it may not prove equally agree• whose authority recommended it to me; though of able to get something by the bargain. ... I shall print the two evils I have most frequently chosen the eli• by Subscription" (p. 436). sion as the least. The point to be drawn from Cowper's attitude is Though the Romantic poets, in their proto-democratic SUMMER 1983 BLAKE AN ILLUSTMTED QUARTERLY PAGE 29 age, didn't go around appealing to the "delicate ear," 29 November. By this date, Cowper was well on his way they, too, obviously felt the harshness of the hiatus arising toward publishing his translation of Homer, but the turn of from the juxtaposition of a word ending in a vowel and a the year 1787, which will begin Volume III of the Letters, succeeding word that began with one. In Coleridge's poems marks the beginning of a six-month period of depression, elisions are frequent, and even in Shelley's Adonais we find the fourth major one in Cowper's life, that is undoubtedly "th'intense atom glows" and "Torturing th'unwilling related to William Unwin's death, just as a fifth and final dross" (lines 179, 384). The point I am making, through period of severe depression was to follow Mary Unwin's Cowper's articulation of his interest in such minutiae, is paralytic strokes and her physical deterioration. that any form of modernization can be dangerous to When Shelley in his Defence of Poetry speaks of poetic texts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth poets as "those of the most delicate sensibility and the centuries, possibly destroying or muddling details that most enlarged imagination," he was thinking of the great, the authors who were not "in trade" felt were important strong imaginations of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and to the meaning or the aesthetic effects of their poems. Milton —those capable of embodying "sorrow, terror, Beyond the value of these letters for the modern anguish, despair itself in "chosen expressions of an ap• scholar in their revelations about Cowper's times and the proximation to the highest good"; he was not thinking of ways of literary men then, Cowper's correspondence Cowper, Chatterton, Gray, Collins, or Smart. In some of presents models of civilized social intercourse that can these he would have recognized the "delicate sensibility," teach (most of) us a great deal about how to treat our but, again, the Romantics wrote and thought to survive friends. As the first volume showed Cowper coming in the tough-minded world of the French Revolution and through his first bout with madness a bit selfish and self- the succeeding twenty-five years of pan-European wars. righteous, almost celebrating the painful deaths of his Cowper is separated from us by at least two more violent brother and Morley Unwin, this volume finds his ego shocks to a "delicate sensibility," events that have left us healed through poetic recognition and his conscience with larger offenses than the hiatus to delicate ears. If cleansed by his years of kindness and civility to both those there ever succeeds a time of peace when ideological fer• around him at Olney and his correspondents. ment subsides, Cowper's poems and letters, like the fic• One aspect of being a gentleman author was to re• tion of Henry James, will provide subtle lessons in frain from discussing one's writing with every friend and humanity for ladies and gentlemen of "delicate sensibility" correspondent. In preparing Poems (1782), Cowper had and "delicate ear." taken into his confidence only John Newton, who had ar• ranged for Joseph Johnson to publish the volume. That decision had made William Unwin, son of Cowper's beloved Mary Unwin, feel slighted, and Cowper decided to show his regard for Unwin by taking him into his con• fidence about The Task and allowing him, rather than Newton, to arrange for the publication. When he notified Newton that The Task was in press and Newton took umbrage, Cowper handled the situation politely but firmly (see pp. 291-322). Again, Cowper's behavior is unlike that of most modern authors, but it bears scrutiny. As a man indebted to both Newton and Unwin, his closest intellectual companions over the years, Cowper repaid their friendship in the best coin he knew —by tak• ing each into his confidence and associating him with one of Cowper's two major claims to immortality. First, he put his poetry into the hands of Newton, who had earlier involved Cowper in the joint venture of Olney Hymns. Then he turned to the modest younger man and attempted to raise Unwin's self-image through the trust he placed in him and by means of the dedication to Unwin of "Tirocinium" (an attack on contemporary education published with The Task). It is well that Cowper expressed his friendship when he did. Volume II of the Letters opens in January 1782 with one addressed to Unwin as "My dear friend"; when it closes in December 1786, Cowper is still in shock over William Unwin's death on PAGE 30 BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 . . . .") Cousin Davis, author of eleven other works (in• cluding Night of the Hunter), died six weeks after this book was done, and the story and imagery at times bear moving witness to the progress of cancer, of hope and fear and vision: Fear is so funny. There are so many kinds of danger. How do we know when we are in peril? How can we guess that that headache last Wednes• day night at dinner, that slight restlessness through the night, that tiny fever —that these were the bat• tle reports on a monstrous and titanic struggle within us. Against cancer. Or typhoid. Or worse. The narrator, Fifi Leech —at 6:30 in the morning of 4 September 1992, arching her pelvis and grinding merrily into her finger — explains that the sad reason for her being in West Virginia is "the death of the real writer in my family, the late Davis Grubb." But, she goes on, "He was not the author." It is a strange, at times wonderful, production —the story of a female Gulleyjimson told by a modern George MacDonald who can graphically describe "the how and why of having sex with fairies" as well as the paranoia of "TRUCAD," "La Machine! La ultimate world economic order. La whole fucking system that has us all prisoner" ("It had come into being out of the old Trilateral Com• mission . . ."). It is a book which knows its Blake but doesn't trot out quotations in the heavyhanded manner of The Horse's Mouth. At one of many points Sweeley de• claims "from his favorite, next to Shakespeare, Uncle Will Blake: And there to Eternity aspire The selfhood in a flame of fire Till then the lamb of God ..." Fifi adds, "It was one of Uncle Will's lovely little unfin• ished things" (as indeed it is, appearing only as a textual note in Erdman's edition; Sweeley, however, reads from "his scarred and dogeared Nonesuch Blake," where the lines appear among the poems from the Notebook), the Davis Grubb has written a perfectly mad novel called M104 Broadway bus appears "flatulating diesel smokily Ancient Lights —the Last Supper is said to have taken like Uncle Will Blake's farting and belching God — the one place in the Holiday Inn of Weirton, West Virginia, not he called Nobodaddy." An advertisement in the London that far from "a whorehouse on the high-road to Glory Times begins with "The outward ceremony is the Anti- called Jew's Harp House" and near where Uncle Will Christ" (and continues with four lines from Gilbert and Blake showed himself to Sweeley Leech "last Friday night Sullivan, ending, "Then is the spectres' holiday —then is and smiled and joked awhile, and then he told him frankly the ghosts' high noon!"). that Criste had told him that there was one thing lacking." I The loose plot follows Fifi, who likes to fuck and has wonder if Cousin Davis (as he sometimes refers to himself no sympathy for the "machocists" and "homosocials," as in the book) is smiling around us as the people of "ugly, she moves through a late '70s 1992 toward the reconstitu- reeking, steel-mill town, Weirton" struggle to find the tion of the Book of Criste Lite. Her father Sweeley had it cash to buy the mill from the conglomerate that has doomed once, on forty-four pages of yellow ruled paper: "No it and so create the largest worker-owned plant in words. In heaven . . . there is only form and color. And America. He certainly knew "that Weirtons create Criste. movement." And more, says Sweeley, describing a would- Every time." ("Criste," because the "name Christ has be AncientLights, "it was the damnedest, most godawful been disgraced. The name is a cliche —not a metaphor. funny book I ever read. Funny. And horny. A real stroke Criste is a metaphor. Christ is a word like fuck and cunt book!" But that version is lost, and recreating the second and cock —good words, holy words, once. Now soiled entails a collective effort in which Sweeley ("the dear cor- SUMMER 1983 BLAKE AS ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY PAGE 31 ruption of the word See/ey — oi the Fairy Court. Leech dividual." It is pro-dope —low-grade marijuana has been ... a Healer") fights to keep from being organized legalized, and everyone tokes either that or contraband— ("The worst thing that happened to Criste") by the and it is very, so to speak, pro-sex: "Because the Sexual — Church of the Remnant, who, in turn, must battle against the freely given, unbought, unsold, unforced Sexual —is, the vicious Goody Two-Shoes, with their white plastic if you must be told . . . the essence of what someone Bibles, and the ever-present TRUCAD. Fu Manchu, somewhere has called the Criste Lite" (St. Paul appears as another "religioeconomic" heretic, makes an appearance. a giant turtle, his shell inscribed with intimate details of The achieving of the second book of Criste Lite shows the copulations, to offer his recantation). Few, I suppose, will author's love for the story of Blake pointing to children find much to object to in such positions, yet, confronted and saying "That is Heaven" and also involves Fifi's winding with "La ultimate world economic order," one may find a golden string into a ball. (The parable about becoming a oneself trying, trying, trying, and not quite believing child appears again in Fifi's memory of Sweeley's reaction that agreeable opinions can substitute for analysis. "The at finding her, age three, "with crayons aforethought," perception of power is power," reads one chapter's epi• coloring in first-state woodcuts of "the Adoration of the graph, but it is precisely here that one feels most unsure. Magi and the Whore of Babylon" by Diirer: he "en• What about those workers in Weirton who need $250 couraged me to color a few more of the spidery, wild little million to build Jerusalem in their Dark Satanic Mill? pictures, but I soon wandered away into the tall iris to Ancient Lights lives in its luxuriant images ("the trade jokes with a mushroom-sheltered friend or foe.") On soft, wet braille of scalloped labia"), its at times excessive the way we pass through a house with framed Blake mottos; similes ("Police sirens were yodeling like castrated Dober- hear Uncle Will chanting audibly in Fifi's ear; encounter mans"), and its outright puns ("poets, a batch of pale, statements urged "on authority from none other than Uncle lifehating godhating naysaying bookclub avatars, scuttling Will himself"; see someone reading "not the King James and hopping back and forth in the liberal, cautious, Bible — it was a Nonesuch William Blake"; and ponder how cynical safety of their rabbit-pen warrens"). Some of these to get back "to the place where the golden string will at last live on in the reader's imagination: "The black Ohio be wrapped into a glittering ball. To the goal —that gate River shone and shimmered and wound like a dark, sullen carved in Jerusalem's wall." There is also one minor dif• torrent of Coca-Cola sewering into the rotting teeth of lit• ference raised, as Fifi thinks, "Uncle Will Blake says it is tle children." And some glimmer with something like the wrong for us to love our enemies, that only betrays our true light of Old Uncle Will, as in this description of the friends. I don't know about that. I do know it's better than colors giving meaning to the Book of Criste Lite: pitying our enemies —because that gets us into bed with them ... ." Little wonder in this fantastic effort for Colors you see deep in the flames of glowing coals astonishment and against death that the recurring refrain is in a grate on a deep winter's night. Colors you sometimes see deep inside the pagan quiet of a 'Try to believe —only try, as Uncle Will Blake has our dear Christmas Tree. And something—something Lord bid us." dangerous, too —like the tints you see flaming in Ancient Lights takes several clear positions. It is pro- sorrow within the wings of a murdered jungle but• individual—"the lonely, Criste-crazed individual" —and terfly imprisoned in a Lucite paperweight. anti-institutional: "when Truth is Organized, it becomes While one would probably hesitate before going out a Lie. There is no bigger Lie than organized Truth. There to contribute $10.95 to La Machine for the paperback ver• is no greater Hate than Organized Love .... The only sion of the novel, many readers of Blake will surely want place where Truth can survive is in the spirit of the In• to look into Ancient Lights as time goes by. PAGE 32 BLAKE AS ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 tion to the theme of the Golden Age is that of a spiritual transformer embodying the concept of vicarious atone• ment" (49). These instances give some notion of the prose style in the book, the sponginess of the ideas, the hollow use of Blake as touchstone. On the whole, however, The Myth of the Golden Age strays only rarely into fantastical interpretations. For the most part, Stevenson's observations are inoffensive Warren Stevenson. The Myth of the Golden Age and unarguable, like those in headnote comments in in English Romantic Poetry, Romantic Reas- undergraduate anthologies. Although there is nothing in sessment, 109, ed. James Hogg (Salzburg this book that a scholar or critic will find valuable, it might Studies in English Literature). Institut fur usefully serve students as a light introduction to the Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universitat romantic quest for bliss. It is a pity that its Salzburg venue makes it unlikely that the book will be sold in those outlets Salzburg, 1981. iv + 109 pp. where undergraduates purchase their study guides. Reviewed by V. A. De Luca This slender book, really a pamphlet, is as diffuse as it is brief. Large as the subject announced in its title may seem, Warren Stevenson's treatment widens the focus. What he has produced is not an essay on the Romantic re• vival of a specific classical topos but rather six thumbnail synopses of the high points in the poetic careers of the six Geoffrey Keynes, Kt. , and Peter Davidson, major Romantic poets, considered seriatim. Since none of eds. A Watch of Nightingales. London: The these chapters runs longer than twenty pages, the com• mentaries on individual works tend to be emaciated, and Stourton Press, 1981. xii + 48 pp. Four hun- Stevenson has room for the Golden Age only en passant. dred copies printed. As one might expect from the author of an earlier book largely about Blake (Divine Analogy, Salzburg Reviewed by G. E. Bentley, Jr 1972), Stevenson makes Blake the cornerstone of what the• matic structure the book has, and it begins appropriately enough with the central statement: "The Nature of my Work is Visionary or Imaginative it is an Endeavour to Sir Geoffrey Keynes and Professor Peter Davidson have Restore what the Ancients calld the Golden Age." But collected "nearly fifty poems" (p. [xii]), or rather twenty- Stevenson never quite explains what precisely Blake is seven poems and twelve fragments (some of them in prose), saying here or how he is reading the Ancients. As a result addressed or referring to the "Most musical" of birds, as no firm idea of the Golden Age ever emerges in the book, Milton called the nightingale. Isaac Walton says that the although as he skims from poet to poet and work to work man who hears at midnight Stevenson keeps an eye out for anything salvational, any• thing numinous, anything pastoral, anything apocalyptic, the clear aires, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of anything agreeable, anything specially labeled "Edenic" her voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say, Lord, or "golden." There are nonetheless some astounding omis• what Musick hast thou provided for the Saints in Heaven, sions: no mention, for instance, of Wordsworth's "Pros• when thou affordest bad men such musick on earth! pectus" and the famous lines, "Paradise and groves / Ely- The title derives from the technical term for a group of sian, Fortunate Fields —like those of old / Sought in the nightingales, as in an exaltation of larks and a charm of Atlantic Main —why should they be / A history of departed goldfinches, also derived from Dame Julia Berners's Boke things, / Or a mere fiction of what never was?" —the most of Hawkyng, Huntyng, and'Fysshyng (i486). germane lines to Stevenson's subject in all of Romantic The poets are, of course, concerned with the birdsong poetry. At the same time there is room for such things as rather than the songbird, for the bird itself is negligible in a five-page treatment of "Christabel," where the Golden appearance and usually invisible. Some try to imitate the Age comes in only twice —Christabel's bedchamber is a sound of the song, as in Skelton and Coleridge's "jug jug" "mini-Golgonooza," and "Christabel's paradigmatic rela• and Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khahyam, "Wine! SUMMER 1983 BLAKE A\ ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY PAGE 33 Wine! Wine! Red Wine!," but most describe it or Clearly the liquid measure of sound is not enough reproduce its rhythms, like Coleridge's for the poets, but they must make what Joseph Warton merry Nightingale calls "Contemplation's favourite bird" into an emblem of That crowds and hurries, and precipitates the human condition, in an attempt to With fast thick warble his delicious notes .... quite forget But perhaps most interesting is the way the poets, What thou among the leaves hast never known, moved to a fine frenzy by the shower of song, are governed The weariness, the fever, and the fret not by the song they heard in the "melodious plot / Of Here, where men sit and hear each other groan. beechen green, and shadows numberless" but by what The raison d'etre of this little book is the poem called they heard in the songs of other poets. "To the Nightingale" etched about 1784 by George In the Renaissance, the most important influence was Cumberland: "This anthology has . . . been built that of Ovid, who in his Metamorphoses tells of the rape of around" the poem (p. [viii]). Sir Geoffrey owned copies Philomela by Tereus and, at the moment of her revenge, of this poem for many years and cherished them as ex• their transformation into birds, Philomela into a nightin• amples of Cumberland's experiments with printing, until gale and Tereus into a Hoopoe: abut 1980 Robert Essick suggested a Blake connection. How prettily she tells the tale The suggestion was that the transcription might be not by Of Rape and Blood. Cumberland but by Blake, but they soon decided that Richard Barnfield in 1598 hears the legend in the song: the evidence for this was inconclusive. Fie, fie, fie, now she would cry Teru Teru, by and by ... . However, the inquiry stimulated Sir Geoffrey to speculate that while Blake probably did not transcribe the In the myth the singer is female, and so most of the sing• poem, he may well have composed it: "the internal ing birds are too, from Chaucer and Sidney (1598) and evidence that it could have been composed only [sic] by Shakespeare through Thomas Carew (1651) and Milton Blake was very strong" (p. [vii]). Sir Geoffrey canvassed a (1673) and Marvell (1681), down to Sir John Vanbrugh number of distinguished scholars and critics on the persua• (1702), William Walsh (1721), Joseph Warton (1746), siveness of this internal evidence and published the con• John Keats implicitly (1820), and even such an acute sensus, with a facsimile of the print, in The Book Collector observer as John Clare (1825). But it is, of course, the in 1981, attributing the composition of the poem em• male, not the female, who sings, though the only poets phatically to Blake. Certainly all the scholars and critics to get the sex right here are Cowper (1782), Blake in there cited either agree with Sir Geoffrey, though usually Milton (1804-P08), and Pound (1919). not in terms as emphatic as his own, or at least present Similarly, the bird was thought to learn against a evidence tending to his conclusion. He also printed the thorn to stimulate her song, joyfully to mourn the prick, poem in a very slim, handsome volume in 1980 called To as it were, as in the annonymous song set to music by the Nightgale, though omiting there both the facsimile Robert Jones (1600): and most of the evidence that the poem is by Blake. percht with prick against her breast, Readers of Blake I An Illustrated Quarterly will be chiefly She sings fie, fie, fie, fie, as if she suffered wrong concerned with the evidence that the anonymous poem Till seemingly pleased sweet, sweet concludes her song. called "To the Nightingale" printed for George Clearly it is something added to the birdsong which has Cumberland was in fact composed by William Blake. carried away the poet's imagination. Almost as powerful is the tradition of jealous The external evidence is very slight. The poem was musical rivalry echoed by Goldsmith in his History of the certainly sent in January 1784 in a letter from George Earth and Animated Nature, in Buffon's Histoire Cumberland to his brother as an example of his new, Naturelle des Oiseaux, and in Thomas Pennant's British cheap, and easy method of etching and printing. William Zoology, probably deriving from Pliny's Natural History: Blake was probably experimenting with similar methods of etching and printing, which he apparently alludes to all of them [nightingales] have not the same, but in his Island in the Moon (?1784) and which evolved into every one a special kind of musicke by her selfe: his own illuminated printing. Cumberland certainly nay they strive who can do best, and one laboureth knew of Blake at the time, for he mentioned him in his to excel another in varietie of song and long contin• uance: yea and evident it is, that they contend in review of the annual Royal Academy exhibition in 1780, good earnest with all their will and power: for often- and they became intimate friends, exchanging correspon• time she that hath the worse and is not able to hold dence from at least 1795 through 1827. The poem was out with another, dieth for it, and sooner giveth up printed by William Staden Blake, the writing-engraver 1 her vitall breath, than giveth over her song. of Exchange Alley, and, according to Sir Geoffrey, "It can William Walsh writes in 1721 of a nightingale driven to be inferred from this action that Cumberland was not suicide by despair at rivaling the echo of her own song or yet, in 1784, the close friend of William Blake, the artist, "the Waters . . . laughing in the Brook." that he afterwards became" (p. [viii]). I am puzzled by PAGE 34 BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 the logic of this sentence but conclude that it means that Till, bursting forth, the jolly peal shall float if Cumberland had known the poet well he would have Upon the Breeze, and tell a tale, to move asked him to print the poem. But we do not know that Bald Apathy, or smooth the wrinkled brow of Care. the poet could have printed it then —we don't know And may no Hind thy secret haunt disclose. Or wanton Heifer near the thicket stray, when he acquired his own printing press (probably not Rudely to break thy song, thy breast affright; until autumn 1784) —and there is no evidence that he But whilst Attention hears thy gentle lay, ever welcomed or did casual job-printing, as opposed to Soft Eve advance, clad in Her mantle gray. printing his own plates. But the more slightly Cumberland And Cynthia's silvry beams illuminate the night. knew the poet, the odder it seems that he should have Sir Geoffrey finds "jolly" characteristic of Blake, as it been etching his poem and sending it to friends without is used "on three occasions in Poetical Sketches" (p. [viii]), identifying the author —it rather smacks of plagiarism. but it is scarcely a peculiarly Blakean word — Milton uses Certainly when a friend sends me a poem in a letter, I it in his sonnet on the nightingale. The phrase "the assume that he wrote it unless he tells me the contrary. Sir wrinkled brow of Care" is an eighteenth-century conceit Geoffrey's theory is that "To the Nightingale" is a poem which is repeated "in a prose composition of about the left over from Poetical Sketches (1783), but there is no same date" ["then she bore Pale desire" (?1783)] as "Care evidence whatever that the poem was considered for this Sitteth in the wrinkled brow," and "Bald Apathy" is collection by the apparent compilers John Flaxman and alleged without evidence to be "an unusual conjunction the Reverend Mr. A. S. Mathew, and there is no evidence of words pointing to Blake's authorship" (pp. [viii—ix]). that Cumberland had anything to do with the production In his article, Sir Geoffrey satisfies himself that Blake of that volume, though he acquired copy D of it at an composed "To the Nightingale" by canvassing vainly for an unknown date. Cumberland may have known Blake in alternative author. For example, he quotes a passage from a 1784, he may have seen his manuscript poems then poem undoubtedly by Cumberland which is strikingly (though there is no evidence that anyone other than different from "To the Nightingale" in diction and ac• Flaxman and Mathew did), and he could have presented complishment and concludes therefore that Cumberland a printed copy to his brother —but there is no direct cannot have written it. But this presumes a uniformity of evidence that he did so, and the external probabilities are vocabulary and achievement in a poet which is very rare. against it. It would, for instance, be difficult to demonstrate from Sir Geoffrey finds "the internal evidence . . . very internal evidence alone that the author of strong," but this suggests the understandable pride of I'll draw my sword, nor ever sheath it up, ownership and discovery rather than the dispassionate 'Till England blow the trump of victory. persuasion of scholarship. "To the Nightingale" is an Or I lay stretch'd upon the field of death! ["King Edward the Third" from Poetical Sketches (1783)] agreeable little poem in four six-line stanzas, written in a somewhat stereotyped eighteenth-century style. The vo• was the same as the author of the famous passage from cabulary is fashionably poetical, with the "lovely Chauntress Milton (1804-?8): of the lonely Bow'r," "wildly pour[/>?£] thy mellow Min- Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: strels'y [sic]" a "Hind," and "Cynthias's silvry beams." Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant Land. This is not Blake's characteristic vocabulary and dic• tion—but then, neither is that of a number of poems in Sir Geoffrey notes that Coleridge in his "The Poetical Sketches, such as "An Imitation of Spencer" with Nightingale" follows Blake in making the nightingale's its "jocund hours," "tinkling rhimes," "Pan," song cheerful ("merry") rather than melancholy and even "Mercurius," and "Mercury." "To the Nightingale" runs: suggests therefore "that he had seen one of the counter- proofs [of "To the Nightingale"] made for Cumberland" Come lovely Chauntress of the lonely Bow'r, (p. [ix]), but other poets too found the nightingale's song (Allured by vernal airs to chequer'd shades) cheerful, such as an anonymous author of 1600 ("sweet con• And lightly sit upon the moss grown tree, Near where the dark stream glides, and the soft flow'r, tent"), William Drummond in 1630 ("Well pleased with Rears its enamel'd head to grace the glades; Delights"), and John Keats in 1820 ("thy happy lot"). Come there and wildly pour thy mellow Minstrels'y. The internal evidence is far from conclusive, and we And I with open ears will drink thy song, should hesitiate to alienate the poem from George With cautious trembling steps advancing near, Cumberland and attach it firmly to William Blake. "To Chiding the low hung boughs that bar my way, the Nightingale" is a poem with an achievement above Then gently stretch my weary limbs among The Fern, and part the Woodbind shoots, and peer competence but scarcely reaching to greatness. And there About to find thee perch't upon the bending spray. are words and ideas in it different from those one associates O then begin thy undulating note, with Blake. The poet peering between "the Woodbine Check't by faint Echos from the distant grove, shoots [and fern] ... to find thee" sounds less like And oft recall the sweetly wandring air; Blake than like John Clare in "The Nightingale's Nest," SUMMER 1983 BLAKE AS ILLUSTPu\TED QUARTERLY PAGE 35 "Creeping on hands and knees through matted thorn This Watch of Nightingales is, then, a charming [and fern-leaves] / To find her nest." The "Hind," the nonce collection revealing much about the nature of the "Woodbine," "Cynthia," "Minstrelsy," and the "wanton genius of English poets, but leaving the magical nature of Heifer" are very unusual in Blake's verse,2 and Blake the bird's song and the authorship of "To the knew that the singing nightingale was masculine ("his Nightingale" still mysteriously obscure. As Keats wrote in song" appears in Milton), not feminine as in "To the his "Ode to a Nightingale," "Darkling I listen" "in em• Nightingale" ("lovely Chauntress").3 The evidence for balmed darkness." Blake's authorship of "To the Nightingale" leads hes• itantly to possibility rather than to certainty. He could 1 Tr. Philemon Holland (1601), I, 286, quoted in Fred V. Randel, have written it, but until we have more evidence it will be "Coleridge and the Contentiousness of Romantic Nightingales," safest to assume no more than the possibility —numbers Studies in Romanticism, 21 (1982), 36. of others could have written it as well. And there are 2 Only "hind" appears in Blake's known writings (once, in The numerous contemporary poems which might equally well French Revolution [1791]), though "minstrel" is found thrice in the Concordance, as Professor Essick kindly reminds me. be his, some in periodicals even signed W. B. "To the 3 I must confess that Blake was not always sexually faithful, for Al• Nightingale" does not deserve to be included "in the bion is feminine in the "Prologue to King John" in Poetical Sketches Blake canon" (p. [viii]), except perhaps as a footnote. (1783) but masculine thereafter. Readers and scholars of William Blake are likely to be much attracted by the title and notion of A Visit To William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers, by Nancy Willard and illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen. Nancy Willard relates her experience as a seven-year-old convalescent measles patient introduced to William Blake through the good offices of an im• aginative sitter who first quoted four lines of "The Tyger" and then sent an illustrated book containing William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Having published her first book while a high school senior, Nancy Willard has gone on to publish some four• teen books, a number of them children's books for which she has twice received the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. Ac• cording to the dust jacket summary of A Visit To William Blake's Inn, she teaches in the Vassar English Depart• ment. Her scholarly publications include a study of four twentieth-century poets, William Carlos Williams, Francis Ponge, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Pablo Neruda, entitled testimony of the invisible man (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1970). In the introduction to this study, a Vassar colleague writes admiringly of Nancy Willard's poetry. A Visit to William Blake's Inn, then, is II I L STRATED m VLICE WD MARTIN PR()\ ENS1 \ written by an experienced and successful author of chil• dren's stories, a university teacher of English, a critic and a practicing poet who connects this book with her youth• ful introduction to William Blake's Songs of Innocence Nancy Willard. A Visit to William Blake's Inn, and of Experience. Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers. New The inside of the dust jacket of A Visit To William Blake's Inn assures us that the illustrations reflect the York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. 44 multiple-award-winning artists' "deep love for William pp. $10.95. Blake and the London in which he lived." The paper and color printing of the book are of very good quality. The Reviewed by Elizabeth B. Bentley first illustration to the first poem (pp. 14-15) shows a redhaired man on the steps of a house labelled PAGE 36 BLAKE AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 "WILLIAM BLAKE ENGRAVER POET & PAINTER" creation and sent me off to enjoy the collections of his and "WM BLAKE BED AND BREAKFAST." This is Punch cartoons. Every child or adult who has seen my quite a happy beginning except that William is discon• copy of A Visit to William Blake's Inn commented certingly dressed as a high-Victorian businessman, in a favorably on the charm of the illustrations. So, in sum, frocked coat, a double-breasted waistcoat and morning the illustrations do give pleasure, though that dust jacket trousers. The Provensens are presenting a later period, blurb still worries me. The illustrations, however pleasing often blatantly not William Blake's London. and closely following the text they illustrate, do not However, William Blake does remain redhaired and reveal very obviously "a deep love for William Blake and often is to be seen writing or drawing. On page 21 there the London in which he lived." are a man, woman and boy engaged by candlelight in However, they lead one to Nancy Willard's poems mysterious engraving or process with a press which is not which do have charm and imagination and a final, for printing.1 On pages 29, 35 and 41 the redhaired man appropriately-cited, Blakean message from The Marriage sits at a desk or drawing board with a quill pen and blank of Heaven and Hell which one hopes readers of all ages sheet before him. Since there is no evidence of an ink pot will take to heart: "He whose face gives no light will never to hand, the paper seems doomed to remain blank. become a star." The title and subtitle of the book lead one A tiger is one of the guests at William Blake's Inn. to expect a close connection with Songs of Innocence and The illustrations on pages 12, 32 and 37 are vaguely Songs of Experience, but Nancy Willard's "Poems for In• reminiscent of the Tyger of Blake's Songs of Experience. nocent and Experienced Travelers" are peopled with Perhaps one should leave it at that. However, on pages dragons, rabbits, a shaggy old bear, a lunatic cat, a King of 21, 35, and 41 the Provensens have produced an cats, a wise cow, rats, and pigeons which are disconcertingly overgrown pussy cat which is neither Blakean nor tigerish. unBlakean to me. However, one is pleased to encounter the Twice the verses call for a vehicle to be illustrated, tiger and lambs which are appropriately Blakean. and the Provensens have responded with "Blake's The Willard poems amiably call to mind a number Celestial Limousine" (p. 16) and the vessel Believe (p. 31) of writers other than Blake. "Blake's Wonderful Car which is a wheeled boat captained by Blake. Both these Delivers Us Wonderfully Well" with a driver whose cap is vehicles enjoy the whimsey of a Frederick Rowland Emett labeled "Blake's Celestial Limousine" (p. 17) reminds one of E. M. Forster's "The Celestial Omnibus."2 "Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way" (pp. 32-33) is like Rudyard Kipling's "The Cat Who Walks by Himself," and when "The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives" (p. 22) in the middle of March, one definitely feels as if one were in the wrong fantasy and about to encounter Alice at any moment. (Indeed, there are two little girls who make their first appearance in the illustrations in this poem.) The Marmalade Man reappears in "The Marmalade Man Makes a Dance to Mend Us" (p. 36), which runs: Tiger, Sunflowers, King of Cats. Cow and Rabbit, mend your ways, I the needle, you the thread — follow me through mist and maze: Fox and hound go paw in paw. Cat and rat be best of friends. Lamb and tiger walk together. Dancing starts where fighting ends. This seems to me an excellent marching song for innocent and experienced travelers. There are at least two of Nancy Willard's poems which are clearly modeled on William Blake's Songs. In "The Tiger Asks Blake for a Bedtime Story" (p. 40), the reader familiar with Blake will think of "The Tyger" and "A Poison Tree": William, William, writing late Tvger. Tyger, burning bright. by the chill and sooty grate, In the forests of the night: what immortal story can What immortal hand or eye make your tiger roar again? Could frame thy fearful symmetry' When I was sent to fetch your meat I was angry with my friend: I confess that I did cat I told my wrath, my wrath did end. SUMMER 1983 BLAKE AS ILLUSTKATED QUARTERLY PAGE 37 half the roast and all the bread I was angry with my foe: He will never know, I said. I told it not, my wrath did grow. When I was sent to fetch your drink, And I waterd it in fears. I confess that I did think Night & morning with my tears: you would never miss the three And I sunned it with smiles. lumps of sugar by your tea. And with soft deceitful wiles. Soon I saw my health decline And it grew both day and night and 1 knew the fault was mine. Till it bore an apple bright. Only William Blake can tell And my foe beheld it shine. tales to make a tiger well. And he knew that it was mine. Now I lay me down to sleep And into my garden stole, with bear and rabbit, bird and sheep. When the night had veild the pole: If I should dream before I wake, In the morning glad 1 see may I dream of William Blake. My foe outstretched beneath the tree. Also, "Two Sunflowers Move Into the Yellow Room' (p. 28) is clearly modeled on Blake's "Ah! Sunflower." "Ah, William, we're weary of weather," Ah Sunflower! weary of time, Said the Sunflowers shining with dew. Who countest the steps of the Sun: "Our traveling habits have tired us. Seeking after that sweet golden clime Can you give us a room with a view?" Where the travellers journey is done; They arranged themselves at the window Where the Youth pined away with desire. and counted the steps of the sun, And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: and they both took root in the carpet Arise from their graves and aspire Where the topaz tortoises run. Where my Sunflower wishes to go. The sitter's gift of Blake's Songs to a very young Nancy obviously took root in her imagination and poetry. The result of this implantation is a children's book of much charm in verse and illustration. It also bids us to make comparisons with the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and I hope future sitters and friends of ailing and healthy responsive young children will be as wise as Nancy Willard's Miss Pratt and produce William Blake's verses for them. A Visit to William Blake's Inn well illus trates the value of an early introduction to the Songs. Scholars and admirers of Blake should be very grateful to Nancy Willard for her admirable demonstration that Blake's Songs should be brought out of the study and put into the libraries of the young. 1 The scene is somewhat reminiscent of Fermin Rocker's illustra tions to The Gates of Paradise, a children's novel based on the poet William Blake. See "A Vision in Fiction," Blake, 12 (Winter 197879), 20910. 2 Edward Morgan Forster, "The Celestial Omnibus" and Other Stories (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1911). There is also the anomaly of William Blake having a limousine. In the Supplement to the OED, the earliest known usage of "limousine" is recorded from 1902. Both the poems and the illustrations seem to me quite happily to depict this time rather than a full century earlier. JLuJL it*M I. m. % HftH ITfff *H*IRI» 111! I '•£. *C I ■ i K PAGE 38 BLAKE AS ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SUMMER 1983 NEWSLETTER Anne Baxter as Catherine Blake and Vision of "Innocence" from Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Photo by Global Concepts, Inc., the Swedenborg Foundation, Inc. BLAKE SYMPOSIUM The McMaster Association for 18th Century Studies is hold• ing a one-day symposium on "William Blake and Revolu• tionary Europe" on 14 October 1983. The speakers will be David V. Erdman, David Irwin, Jean Hagstrum, James K. Hopkins, Karen Mulhollen and Alicia Ostriker. The confer• ence will evaluate Blake's response to the various "revolutions" which took place during the last part of the eighteenth cen• tury. The participants will discuss Blake and politics, women, sexuality, millenarianism and war. Information about the conference may be obtained from Professor J. King, De• partment of English, McMaster University, Hamilton, On• tario, Canada L8S 4L9. MORGAN LIBRARY EXHIBITION Twenty-one watercolor illustrations of The Book of Job, the Pickering Manuscript, twelve original designs for Milton's L Allegro and // Penseroso, and illuminated books such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience, America, The First Book ofUrizen, and Europe were among the works by Blake on view at the Pierpont Morgan Library from 18 February through 31 March 1983. BLAKE DOCUDRAMA Global Concepts/The Media Group, Inc. has produced a half- hour television docudrama on Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell for the Swedenborg Foundation of New York. Ac• cording to a press release from Global Concepts, "the final script is set in 1827, during Blake's last days, painting his final version of the engraving ofUrizen spanning the heavens with a giant compass. From the microcosm of the simple rooms shared by William and Catherine Blake, the action expands into a series of visions of what Catherine is reported to have deemed their 'children with bright fiery wings.'" Blake is played by George Rose, Catherine by Anne Baxter, Urizen by Joseph C. Davies, and the Devil by Captain Hag- gerty. The film is available free on loan from the Swedenborg Foundation, which has also sponsored other films that might interest Blake readers. For information and a catalogue, write Darrell Ruhl, Executive Director, Swedenborg Foundation, 139 E. 23rd St., New York, NY 10010. SUMMER 1983 BLAKE AS ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY PAGE 39 VIRTUOSO PERFORMANCE 'Without wisdom love has no U.S.POSTAGEj power." 55. 8 8 Swedenborg %hin 'Stage veteran Campbell gives a riveting portrayal" London Free Press, Nov '82 by Elliott Hayes 16 out of 19 workers are scheduled by management to b» fired Directed by Richard Monettt on trumped-up charger* ITew management wants "new blood"! workers who have worked there for years ere being fired BECAUSE Designed by Debra Hanson they have worked there for years. The frivolity of the mana• gers and owners must cease. No one Is safe. So Sambo's work' ers have chosen to resist — not only for themselves, but for Lighting Iry Robert Bosicorth-Momson all of us who work for a living or seek work. Third Stage: June 18 to August 13 One of Canada's foremost actors introduces s to the visionary poet <\nc\ painter William Blake an explores both serious and light-hearted moments in life ot dramatic intensity. BLAKE: STRATFORD FESTIVAL Blake appears on the Third Stage at Stratford in Ontario this summer in the form of a play by Elliott Hayes. Blake stars Canadian actor Douglas Campbell. The run begins 15 June and ends 13 August. Tickets may be ordered by telephone: the box office number is (519) 273-1600. For complete in• formation write Brochures, Festival Theatre, Stratford, On• tario, Canada N5A 6V2. CALL FOR PAPERS The English Romanticism section of NEMLA is calling for papers, or paper proposals, for its 1984 meeting in Phila• delphia. The topic for the session is "Romanticism, Women, the Feminine, and the Feminist." Papers dealing with one or PALEY'S AUTUMN ADDRESS more of these issues and running approximately ten pages in length are welcome. Studies in Romanticism is planning a spe• For those who might wish to correspond directly with Morton cial issue on the topic, and is interested in reviewing papers Paley in October, his address during that month (only) will selected for this session. Please send proposals to Susan Wolf- be Yale Center for British Art, Box 2120 Yale Station, New son, 15 Glenview Drive, Princeton, NJ 08540 (609-452- Haven, CT 06520. 1089) as soon as possible, essays by September 15. Karl Kiralis 1923-1982 " (C) corrects "Heavns" (EB) and "heaven" source, the King James Bible. (K). A somewhat revised sequence is "([His Judgment] On C688 is a tracing of Blake's hieroglyphic signa• < His Accusation > shall be Forgiveness [and he shalt\ ture on the drawing for Job design XIV; the explanation < that he may > be consumd in his own Shame > / Give (C891) with aid from John Beer makes out that the hand [me]